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Yelena sobs and darts a glance at me, playing at bravely covering for a friend who wronged her. “It was a misunderstanding,” she weeps. “It was my own fault, really it was.”

I almost laugh out loud. The performance is so transparent that I don’t know how anyone breathes standing next to it.

“She threw the water on herself,” I say. “She soaked her own dress and dropped into that chair the moment she heard you in the hall. I know exactly how that sounds. I watched it happen with my own eyes and I can barely believe it either.”

Yelena doesn’t argue with me. She plays the wounded little saint instead. “I’m all right, truly I am,” she says, and cries even harder.

“Tell me everything,” Lev says, and his voice drops low. “All of it, right now.”

Yelena breaks into a fresh wave of sobs. “She has hated me since the moment I first arrived. She simply lost control of herself.” She stops at the exact right instant, and Lev’s eyes turn to solid ice as they land on me.

“She is lying to you,” I say, and I hear how thin it sounds even as it leaves me. The truth almost never sounds as convincing as a good performance, and she’s had a lifetime to rehearse hers.

Yelena trembles prettily against him, and she doesn’t even glance my way, because she doesn’t have to anymore.

“Don’t be too angry with her,” Yelena murmurs, twisting the knife with pure kindness. “She could not help herself, I do understand.”

“I set that dial myself,” I say, louder now. “I checked it twice. I made certain it could not scald a single person, because that is literally my job. She waited until she heard you in the hall, and then she staged every last second of this.”

“Why would I ever do such a thing?” Yelena says, so soft and wounded that I want to scream. “I don’t even know her. Why would she say something so cruel about me?”

And that is the trap of it. There’s no version of the truth I can say out loud that doesn’t sound exactly like a jealous woman inventing excuses.

His jaw goes rigid, and his silence is worse than any shouting. I know every degree of that held-in fury is pointed squarely at me and not at her.

He turns Yelena’s arm gently in his hands, careful of the red marks, and she shakes her head, brave and forgiving to the last.

“It doesn’t hurt so much now,” she whispers up at him, which is its own small masterpiece, because it lets him be the one who made it better. He wipes her tears away with his thumb and presses a kiss to her forehead. That light little kiss drives through my chest like a spike, because I know exactly how gentle that mouth can be, and I know it’s not gentle for me anymore.

“Lev, please,” I say, and my voice shakes badly. “Please, just look at what she’s doing right now.”

He finally turns to me, his brow low and dark, his gaze colder than I have ever once seen it. “Apologize,” he says.

For a second I’m sure I have misheard him.

“Apologize to her, and then clean this up.” His tone hardens on every single word.

“You didn’t even ask me what happened,” I manage. I can barely pull air down into my lungs.

“That’s enough, Delaney.” He says my name sharply, the way you warn an employee who is one step away from being fired.

And I understand, all at once, that he never believed me for a single second. He didn’t weigh her word against mine and choose hers. He simply chose her, before he ever came through the door, and my side of it was never going to be entered into evidence. Hurt and fury jam together in my chest until there is no room left in it to breathe.

“I’m not going to apologize for something I didn’t do,” I force out, and each word is its own small war.

“You are on the clock,” he says. “This is my company.”

“And accepting an outright lie is part of the job now?”

“Taking responsibility for unprofessional behavior is.” His voice never once rises, and somehow that’s worse than screaming, like an invisible hand closing slowly around my throat. “If you can’t manage that much, I’ll find an assistant who can.”

There it is, out in the open. He knows exactly what he’s doing to me. He knows I can’t storm out of here, not with Milo and the debt and the rent all hanging off this one paycheck. He’s using the single thing he knows I cannot walk away from.

I look at him and feel nothing familiar in my chest at all. Somewhere along the way I mistook his control for something that actually meant something. It was my own invention from start to finish. He was never once mine.

I swallow every feeling I have until my mouth tastes of rust and blood, and I grind it out through my teeth. “I’m sorry.”

“Look at her when you say it,” he says, and his brow doesn’t soften even a fraction.