Bastian stops his pacing and faces me fully. “Are you trying to shift blame on this, Ms. Hunter?”
“I’m trying to accurately represent what happened.” I pull out my tablet with shaking hands and start scrolling. “Here. March 15th. Email thread with Frank Moretti. I specifically asked about the ventilation requirements for high-heat oil processing. He assured me the system was overspecced by twenty percent.”
“Clearly, it wasn’t.”
“I guess not. So yeah, someone sucks at math. But that someone isn’t me.” I look up at him, holding his gaze even though my heart is trying to pull anAlienand rip itself out of my chest. “I did my job, Bastian. I asked the right questions. I documented everything. If the engineers gave us bad numbers, that’s not on me.”
Nylah shifts in her seat. The CMO, Rebecca, coughs nervously. A senior designer named Kyle (not Shithead Kyle and not Security Guard Kyle, another Kyle—I’m just now noticing that there are a lot of freaking Kyles at this company) keeps clicking and unclicking his pen and it’s driving me insane.
But I don’t have eyes for any of them. Truth be told, I barely notice they’re there. I can only look at Bastian, standing tall and inhumanely gorgeous at the front of the room, scowling like he might lunge across the table and throttle me for my insolence at any moment.
“Let’s run through a hypothetical,” he says. “If a project manager’s project runs behind on schedule and over budget,wouldn’t you think that’s the project manager’s fault? Isn’t that impliedin the fucking job description?”
“What am I supposed to do when I get the wrong numbers?” I cry out in exasperation. The longer we argue, the more the rest of the room disappears.
Bastian is unmoved. “Check them. Fix them. Do your job.”
“I’m a project manager, not a civil engineer, Bastian. And you pay me to do logistics, not witchcraft. But if witchcraft is what you want, my neighbor’s six-year-old birthday party just had a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat. Should I get his number for you?”
I nearly scream when Bastian’s hands smack the table. It’s like a bolt of lightning. And then, a second later, his growled thunder: “Everyone out,” he rumbles. “Except Hunter.”
Oh, fuck.
Like the rats on a sinking ship they are, they all flee without a moment’s hesitation. Rebecca won’t look at me, Nylah offers me a sympathetic smile, and Kyle shakes his head disdainfully. I’m really starting to dislike Kyles.
The door clicks shut.
Then it’s just me and Bastian in this glass cage.
22
ELIANA
grease fire: /gres 'fi(?)r/: noun
1: a kitchen fire caused by overheated oil.
2: when one screw-up leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another, until everything is burning and you can’t put out the flames and the only thing left to do is scream for help and hope someone comes to save you.
Bastian’s hands are still flat against the table where he slapped them down. I can’t stop looking at them. In part, that’s because my vision is pretty fuzzy at anything beyond ten feet or so.
But it’s also because, no matter how angry he is, those hands remain as beautiful as ever. They’ve got a hold on me, no pun intended. Try as I might, I can’t figure out how to wriggle free of their grasp.
The other reason I’m looking so intently at every curve of his knuckles is that I’m afraid of what’ll happen if I look in his eyes. I know he’s glaring at me. I know those brows are wrinkled and that mouth is pursed. And if all that wasn’t a dead giveaway, Iknow by the rasping, jagged rhythm of his inhales and exhales that he’s very intent on ripping me a new one.
“What the hell was that?” he asks.
Like when he first called the meeting, his voice is at a perfectly reasonable volume. But I flinch anyway, because something in it is worse than a roar.
I flinchinwardly,that is. I won’t let him see me rattled. Fear is catnip for bullies like Bastian, and I refuse to feed him a single bite.
“I’d call it me defending myself,” I fire back.
“You made me look incompetent in front of my senior team. That’s twice now.”
“You did it first!” I sound like a whiny little first grader sayingI’m rubber, you’re glue,but I don’t care. “You called me in here specifically to blame me for something that wasn’t my fault. What did you expect me to do? Take it lying down? Say ‘Thank you, sir; may I have some more’?”
His jaw ticks. “I expected you to be a team player.”
