The sound of a door opening silenced them. Dorian emerged from his office, eyes scanning the room, but lingering on Margo as she bent to polish the glass side table, her blouse gaping at the back. His gaze cut sharply to the coffee counter.
"I don't pay you two to stand around drinking coffee," he said in that emotionless, flat tone Rune had grown to hate.
Finn, unbothered, took a long sip, tossed his cup down into the bin, then deliberately turned back to get another.
"See you around," he told Rune, as if Dorian weren't right there. "Come up for a chat sometime."
She opened her mouth to reply, but a shadow fell across the counter.
"No," Dorian said, voice low and quiet behind her. "She won't."
And that was that.
Finn walked away with an amused smile and another cup of premium coffee, while Rune returned to her "desk", a temporary perch shoved to the edge of the room with no title plate and no real purpose, just a vantage point to watch the craziness unfold.
Tom watched too, eyes flicking from her to Dorian to Margo, the worry on his face growing every day. Rune, who was counting the days with similar desperation, would have told him, "Be afraid, be very afraid”if she knew him better.
The final blow came during a high-stakes meeting with a Japanese investment group. Margo had been in charge of printing and preparing the proposal packets. Old habits died hard, and Rune had offered to double-check them, but Margo had waved her off, insisting she had everything handled.
She hadn't.
When the delegation arrived, they opened their glossy binders to find the wrong data – an outdated version, missing half the translated content. Rune knew immediately what had happened. She had emailed Margo the final file two nights before. It was timestamped and tracked. Plus, she had sent her a reminder yesterday.
Still, when the confusion broke across the polished meeting table, Margo turned toward Dorian with wide, panicked eyes and said, "These are the documents Rune had emailed me."
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence from the delegation who had worked with Rune before.
Then Dorian turned to Rune with murder in his eyes.
His tone was artic.
"Is that true?"
Rune looked directly at him and replied succinctly, "No."
Margo's voice turned syrupy. "I'm just saying, maybe it was miscommunication-"
Dorian cut her off. "This was your task. If you couldn't manage it, you should've said so."
He turned back to Rune. "You should've checked anyway. You knew she is new here."
The words were unnecessary. For once, Rune held his gaze. "It won't be a problem as I have only a couple of days of employment to go."
Then she opened her laptop and printed out the right document .
The meeting continued after a delay of half an hour, salvaged through fast thinking and gracious apologies. But the damage had been done. Later, long after the delegation left, Dorian passed her in the corridor. He slowed for a moment, his mouth opening slightly before he changed his mind and walked away with Margo at his heels.
He didn't say anything. There was no apology or acknowledgment.
As Rune watched him walk away, she realized he had burned off the last of her respect as well. Because that pause was the closest Dorian Albury had ever come to regret. A pitiful attempt, and that too accidental.
The office emptied slowly after the disaster of a meeting. Margo flounced off early, citing "a stress migraine" and dropping her new gel pen with unnecessary aggression on the table, like it was a casualty of war. Tom lingered awkwardly, then left with a sympathetic glance. Rune pretended not to see any of it.
She stayed. She had always been the last to leave until recently. She was sorting through old files when she heard familiar footsteps behind her.
Dorian.
"Still here," he said, his tone edged with something she had never heard in his voice. Dorian making small talk?
