As she sat back in the office chair, Selena pushed the stray brown hair from her glance as a triumphant smirk played across her lips. Her editor, a grizzled veteran named Morris, dropped a thick file onto her cluttered desk. It landed with a thud that spoke of significance. "Pack it in, Cross. You're done with city hall chumps," he grunted, his voice a gravelly rasp. "I'm giving you the big leagues." He tapped a glossy photo clipped to the front of the file. It was a picture of Damien Voss, taken at some charity gala. He was devastatingly handsome, his smile a calculated masterpiece of charm, his eyes a piercing, arctic blue that seemed to hold a universe of secrets. "Damien Voss," Selena said, her voice laced with disdain. "The Prince of Corporate Piracy. What's the angle? Hostile takeovers? Union busting? Insider trading?" She had followed his meteoric rise. Voss Enterprises was an empire built on the bones of its competitors. He was brilliant, untouchable, and by all accounts, utterly ruthless. "All of the above, and then some," Morris confirmed. "He just acquired Sterling Industries, ran it into the ground, and sold it off for parts, leaving five thousand people jobless right before the holidays. He’s a shark, and he’s bleeding the city dry behind a smokescreen of philanthropy. But no one can get close to him. He’s built a fortress of lawyers and PR reps. I want you to find a crack in the armor. Get inside. Find the dirt. I want a story that will strip the golden-boy veneer off Damien Voss for good."

Selena's fierce determination lit in her eyes. This was the kind of story she lived for. A real dragon to slay. For the next week, the only thing she could think about was Damien Voss. Her apartment walls plastered with articles, financial statements, and a convoluted web of connections that all led back to him. Hearing disgruntled former employees spinning tales of a boss with an inhuman ability to concentrate and a temper that could freeze hell, she was quick to get business rivals talking, who spoke of him with a mixture of hatred and awe, called him a predator who could smell weakness from a mile away. Tens of thousand-of-counter-narratives of his public generosity, his calculated charm rebutted every of his ruthless doings. He was ghost, phantom of polished surfaces and dark rumors. As Morris had warned, getting an interview was trying to breach Fort Knox. His executive assistant, a woman with a voice colder than a winter morning, stonewalled her at every turn. Damien Voss did not grant interviews to journalists known for their...adversarial approach. So, Selena changed tactics.

What she best does, digging, is what she did. It was a vice president at a charitable foundation that Voss heavily sponsored. To use a little collateral she had about the foundation's misallocated funds-slightly embarrassing but nothing illegal-and blackmail her into a ten-minute meeting, with that appointment made. Top floor, Voss Tower. She felt both exhilarating victory and tinging apprehension; she was about to walk into the lion's den. Landslide of silence, the stomach-churning ascent to the penthouse floor. As the doors opened, she found herself in an office that was not so much a working space as a power accolade. It was massive and sparse, punctuated by glass boasting of a god-eye view of Manhattan. An altar of a room with a broad view onto the Great Office Desk of Dark Lustrous Wood-an altar, indeed. And behind it, Damien Voss. The photos hadn't done him justice; in person, he seemed to come alive and dominate the atmosphere with a presence so potent that one felt almost a suction effect from all the air in the room. He stood higher than his expectation, shoulders broad beneath a perfectly fitted grey suit, a suit that exquisitely clung to his liquid-gold-like elegance. With an electric current akin to pure, unmitigated lightning shot right into her, she felt a jolt from the moment his cold navy eyes zeroed in on her, like an arctic chill. "Ms. Cross," he said, his voice low, smooth, and terrifically baritonic; far more compelling than she could ever have imagined. "What do I owe the pleasure of this... ambush?" He motioned for her to sit, an almost-smile flirting on his lips, but never reached his eyes. Those eyes seemingly trapped her, scrutinizing her with a ferocity that made her feel exposed. She steeled herself, gripping her notepad like a shield. "Mr. Voss. Thank you for seeing me. I want to talk about Sterling Industries." He walked around the desk, approaching less to sit than to lean against it, closing off some of the space separating them. Tension mounted in the air. Close enough for her to smell him, any questions she had ever prepared vanished from her skull. An intoxication with the smell of expensive cologne, sandalwood, and something else... something wild and primal, like the scent of thunderstorm-washed earth. Clean, masculine, and disturbingly so with a very ancient part of her brain that now found it achingly familiar.

"Sterling was a failing company, Ms. Cross. A necessary casualty of market evolution," he said, and his voice sunk lower, almost intimately so. He leaned in a little, his gaze flickering down to rest on the pulse fluttering at the base of her throat. "But I don't think that's what you're really here for. You're a hunter, just like me. You're looking for a weakness. A flaw in the armor." Her heart was hammering against her ribs. He was disarming her, counteracting her ambition. Heat crept onto her skin, a strange mix of anger and unwelcome desire. This is what he could do. He didn't command only boardrooms; he commanded the very space around him. She held his gaze in full confidence and refused to look away. "The five thousand people you put out of work might disagree with your definition of 'evolution'." Something old and dark flickered in his eyes. For a tiny fraction of a second, she could swear they had flickered with a glowing golden hue, startling in its brilliance. Pushing himself from her desk, he began to pace, restless and caged. "The world is a brutal place, Ms. Cross. Only the strong survive. You, of all people, should understand that." He stopped directly in front of her chair, looking down at her. The raw power rolling off him was suffocating. The beast inside him was drawn to her, to the defiant fire in her eyes, to the scent that was driving him to the brink of his sanity. It was her. The woman from his dreams. He had to fight every instinct screaming at him to pull her from the chair, to press his face into her neck, to claim her. Selena felt trapped, mesmerized by the conflict she saw warring in his expression. This wasn't just a ruthless CEO; this was a man wrestling with a demon. The realization was terrifying but infinitely more compelling than anything she had ever experienced. The professional curiosity she'd started with was rapidly morphing into a dangerous, personal obsession. He reached out and brushed a stray lock of hair from her cheek. His touch was a brand, a scalding hot iron through the whole of her body. "Be careful," he whispered, a gravelly warning that held equal weight in both threat and plea. "Some secrets are buried for a reason. If you dig too deep, you might not like the monster you unearth."