Fated to My Cruel CEO novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Terms

He agrees to keep the plant open until the Carrow anniversary party if she opens her father's files to him. Lowell's text calls them both to dinner.

"Everyone back to their stations," Ansel said to the floor, without looking away from me. "The line restarts in two minutes."

Nobody moved for a second.

Then the woman with the gray braid grabbed the nearest switch, and the conveyor groaned back to life.

Ansel took my elbow, and it was not gentle.

He walked me up the metal stairs to the glass conference room above the floor and shut the door behind us.

Down below, three hundred and forty people were watching us through the glass.

He didn't care.

He put his half of the card on the table and stood with both hands flat on either side of it.

"Talk," he said.

"They told me you were dead."

He laughed once, a short sound with nothing in it.

"Who did?"

"I was fourteen. I wrote to the Lucas County youth center and asked for you by name."

I swallowed.

"A man called back and said you died of pneumonia the winter after the fire."

"Who called?"

I hesitated.

"My father."

"Your father," he repeated.

"Lowell Carrow. He took me in off the road that night. He had been the board president at Greer House for nine years."

"I know exactly who he was."

His voice stayed level, but his knuckles had gone white against the glass table.

"I was in that center four years, Mona. I was alive the whole time."

He didn't blink.

"I was alive when I got out at fourteen. I was alive when I turned eighteen and went looking for you."

"I didn't know."

"You had twenty years and a telephone."

"I had a man who told me you were buried in Lucas County and a name I wasn't allowed to say at his table."

"You could have said it anyway."

"I was nine," I said. "Then I was twelve, then fifteen, and every year it got harder to say out loud."

He looked at me then, really looked, from my work boots to the chain at my neck.

I made myself hold still.

It was strange to see him.

He had been a skinny boy with a split lip and a bad haircut.

He used to steal oranges from the kitchen and split them down the middle.

Now he was a stranger in a four-thousand-dollar suit.

The scar through his left eyebrow was the only thing that had not changed.

"Why did he take you?" Ansel asked.

I had thought about this question for twenty years.

"He said I had nobody, and he was the board president, and it was the decent thing to do."

That was true, and it was not the whole answer.

I could feel the rest of it sitting in my throat.

"The decent thing," Ansel said. "He embezzled from that house for nine years, and the week the auditor was coming, the ledger room burned."

"I didn't know that."

"I know you didn't. I have spent twelve years finding out."

He straightened up.

"Here is what happens now."

He said it with no heat in it at all.

"I am not closing this plant today."

My breath went out of me.

"I am keeping it open and paid until the Carrow sixtieth anniversary party."

"That is twelve days from now, on a Saturday."

"After the party, I decide what happens to the three hundred and forty."

"What do you want?"

"Lowell Carrow's private files. His study, his safe, his phone, his club. Everything he keeps from the board."

"You want me to rob my father."

"I want you to open a door you have been walking through your whole life."

He picked up my half of the card, held it up between his fingers, and looked at it.

"And you stay where I can see you. Every day. At my side, at the plant, at the table when I say so."

"Why?"

"Because you are his daughter," he said. "And because I don't trust you for one second."

That hurt more than it should have.

I held out my hand for my card.

"That's mine."

"It is half of a promise," he said. "Neither of us kept it."

He put it in my palm.

His fingers brushed mine, and the skin where they touched went hot.

Neither of us moved for a long second.

Then he stepped back, and his face closed.

"Twelve days," he said. "After that you can cry to him about it."

"I won't be crying."

"Good."

I looked down through the glass at the packing line.

The woman with twenty-six years was glaring up at us with her arms crossed.

"I'll do it," I said. "For them. Not for you."

"I didn't ask for the reason."

"And you don't touch a single paycheck for those twelve days."

For the first time, one corner of his mouth moved.

It was not a smile.

"You bargain like you did over the oranges," he said.

I almost cried right there, because he remembered.

My phone buzzed on the table between us.

It was a text from my father.

*Come home for dinner tonight, sweetheart. Bring your new boss.*

I stared at it.

Ansel read it over my shoulder, and his whole body went still.

"He knows I'm here," he said.

"He knew before you walked in. Somebody on the board must have told him."

"Then he's expecting you to tell me no."

"What do you want me to say?"

Ansel picked up his keys, with his half of the card swinging from the ring.

"Tell him yes," he said. "I want to see his face."

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend