Ivy pulled an all-nighter redoing the ruined mockups and brought the finished work to Barrow Group herself, only to be turned away at the door.
A call to Amy finally explained why Gerald Barrow had spent the day at Thornwood Group’s product launch instead.
Thornwood belonged to Desmond Wolfe.
It sat squarely in the luxury goods space, aimed permanently at the Wolfe family’s market share.
That it had thrown together a launch event with zero warning, right under Wolfe Jewels’ nose, set off every alarm bell Ivy had.
She rushed straight back to report to Nathaniel and pushed open his office door to find Chloe draped pitifully against his shoulder, mid-complaint.
“Nathaniel, I never wanted to compete with Miss Hart for the director’s role!
She’s the one who demoted me to your secretary, and now people are saying I’m not fit to design anything and that I’m only good for one thing.
How am I supposed to walk through that office again?”
Tears clung to her lashes like dew on a flower, and she looked, if anything, more delicate for it.
Ivy knocked once and stepped inside, her voice level.
“You’re the one who called Barrow Group to move the meeting without authorization, and then you’re the one who destroyed my team’s mockups.
If it weren’t for Nathaniel’s personal interest in you, company policy would have had you terminated already.”
“Director, I know you’re worried he’ll be angry that you upset a client, and I’ll speak up for you if you want but don’t try to pin this on me!” Chloe shrank back behind Nathaniel, voice trembling.
“And the mockups your assistant shoved into me on purpose, that’s why the coffee spilled.
I have no idea why he’s decided to hate me so much.”
“Impressive, how smoothly you can rearrange the truth.” Ivy hadn’t even finished her sentence before Nathaniel cut in, cold and clipped.
“You cause the damage and then look for someone else to answer for it.
Is that really the standard you hold a director to?
A designer who can’t even keep her own team’s work safe has no business pointing fingers.”
He studied her composed face, half expecting that if she just apologized the way she used to, this could all be smoothed over easily enough.
Ivy let out a short, humorless laugh.
Since when did Nathaniel, a man who’d always kept business and personal life in separate boxes, go this far out of his way to shield someone?
Was this really about Chloe, or was it punishment dressed up as favoritism, aimed squarely at Ivy for refusing to fall back in line?
Either way, if he had no interest in finding the actual person responsible, there was no point wasting her breath on him.
Better to focus on damage control.
She had a month left on this job.
Might as well use it properly.
“Since you want Chloe to step into the director role this quickly, it makes sense to keep her close so you can personally guide her that way no one questions how she earned it.
I made the reassignment with her career in mind.” Ivy delivered the line without a flicker of jealousy or concern, which only seemed to enrage Nathaniel further her total indifference to the idea of matching him with Chloe cutting deeper than any protest could have.
He leaned in abruptly, boxing her against the desk with nowhere to step back.
“Since Mrs.
Wolfe is being so generous, let’s expand the handover.
Beyond design, you can teach the next generation exactly how to serve me.
How to please me.”
Serve.
Please.
Flatter.
The memory of him calling her a paid bed-warmer in front of Chloe surfaced instantly, and nausea rolled through her.
Her expression only cooled further.
“Don’t worry, President Wolfe.
I’ll make sure Chloe becomes the perfect replacement for exactly the kind of toy you seem to prefer.”
The word landed exactly where she meant it to.
Chloe, furious at being upstaged in her own scene, threw herself into Nathaniel’s arms with a sob.
“We’re both women.
How could you say something so cruel to me?”
Nathaniel stiffened, some instinct telling him to push her off but one glance at Ivy’s face changed his mind, and he pulled Chloe closer instead, murmuring something soothing.
Then, jaw tight, he turned back to Ivy.
“Apologize.
Now.”
Chloe watched the exchange with perfect composure, neither humble nor smug.
“I only repeated exactly what you said to me, Nathaniel.
Where’s the lie in that?”
“You” His face drained of color.
That soft, wounded act she’d been running from the start had been exactly that.
An act.
Ivy, meanwhile, had teeth of her own, and she wasn’t about to come out of this on the losing end.
Before the standoff could escalate further, Marcus burst in with the design department’s deputy director trailing behind him, cutting through the tension entirely.
The deputy director, Oliver Reed, spotted Ivy and stormed toward her, eyes red-rimmed.
“Director Hart, whatever’s going on between you and President Wolfe, whatever’s behind you resigning that doesn’t give you the right to sell out the rest of us!
You handed our work, everything we poured ourselves into, straight to Thornwood.
Did you even think about the people who stayed up all night on that?”
Ivy’s stomach dropped.
“Slow down.
What happened?”
Oliver, still catching his breath, kept going.
“Don’t play innocent.
Thornwood threw together a product launch out of nowhere today, and the designs they unveiled were the exact ones our team killed ourselves finishing.
You had those files.
The second they left the building with you, Thornwood had them too.”
“Barrow Group announced on the spot that they’re signing with Thornwood instead.
Which means whatever happened with Gerald Barrow yesterday wasn’t an accident you’d already been coordinating with Thornwood’s CEO.” Oliver pulled a photo from his jacket Ivy, wrapped in Desmond Wolfe’s arms, unmistakably intimate.
“President Wolfe, the company just took a massive hit because of her.
We can’t let her walk out of here with Thornwood’s money in her pocket.”
Chloe gasped, hand flying to her mouth.
“Isn’t Desmond Nathaniel’s biggest rival?
Why would Miss Hart be in his arms like that?
You went to the care facility yesterday, didn’t you?
Is there some financial trouble at home that pushed you into this?”
Nathaniel’s eyes went dangerously narrow.
Ivy’s gaze cut across the room like steel.
“One photo, taken with obvious intent, and Chloe’s already rushing to hang this around my neck?”
“I was only trying to help you,” Chloe said, going pale, retreating further behind Nathaniel.
He stepped in front of her fully and closed his hand around Ivy’s wrist, his expression darkening into something that filled the room with dread.
“Given everything sitting in front of me right now, what excuse could you possibly have left?”
The silence that followed was absolute.
No one in the room dared to breathe.
Something bitter twisted in Ivy’s chest.
Excuse.
He hadn’t asked for proof.
He hadn’t asked for an explanation.
Two words, and he’d already handed down the verdict.
She didn’t bother arguing further; she called Gerald Barrow, then Amy, and found both numbers blocked.
Her stomach dropped through the floor.
Nathaniel watched her, unmoved, his voice flat and final.
“You have one week.
Recover the losses, or the company files theft-of-trade-secrets charges against you.”
Looking into his eyes cold, closed, utterly certain Ivy felt her own eyes sting, a wave of injustice she couldn’t push down.
Barrow reneging.
The mockups were destroyed.
Thornwood hijacking the launch.
A staged photo timed perfectly to poison the room.
There was no version of this that Nathaniel could look at and genuinely believe was coincidence.
He’d let her take the fall without even asking questions, likely payback for refusing to fold when she’d pushed for the divorce.
Nathaniel’s pride ran deep.
A man repeatedly turned down by a woman he considered beneath him in the first place of course he’d want to watch her break.
“One week, then.” Ivy held his gaze, unwavering, and walked out with her spine straight, refusing to give the room the satisfaction of watching her flinch.
That “chance” run-in with Desmond outside the hospital hadn’t been a chance at all.
It had been staged, start to finish, purely to get that photo.
I was set up.
But I am not going to take this lying down.
Nathaniel’s expression stayed cold, calculating.
Ivy without a leash on her stubborn, unpredictable, nothing like the compliant woman he’d grown used to unsettled him more than he wanted to admit.
And the more she pulled away from him, the more he found himself tracking her every move, whether he wanted to or not.
Irritated past the point of patience, he ordered the room cleared.
Marcus lingered at the door, hesitant.
“President Wolfe Barrow only switched to Thornwood because the Barrow family’s heir just got installed at the company, and that heir happens to be close with Desmond.
There’s no version of this where Mrs.
Wolfe talks Barrow back.
Are you really not going to step in for her?”
“She’s the one who chose to walk away from what I was protecting her from,” Nathaniel said, voice like ice.
“Whatever happens to her now, she brought on herself.”
He was waiting, he told himself, to see exactly how far she’d bend once she ran out of options.