Jessica Oberdeen had arrived at seven-fifteen, as she always did, and by eight-thirty had already processed more reports than most of her colleagues would complete by noon. It was a point of pride for her, this efficiency, this relentless forward momentum that had characterized her entire career. The office around her hummed with its usual morning rhythms—the gurgle of the coffee machine, the distant murmur of early arrivals making small talk, the soft percussion of keyboards from the other early risers who shared her work ethic, if not her ambition.

Her cubicle was immaculate. No personal photographs cluttered the workspace, no motivational posters with their insipid platitudes. Just clean lines, organized files, and the glow of her dual monitors displaying the quarterly projections she’d been refining since her arrival. The fluorescent lights cast their unflattering pallor over everything, but Jessica had long ago stopped caring about flattering lighting. Results mattered. Performance mattered. Everything else was decoration.

She reached for her coffee—black, no sugar, because she’d never seen the point in dressing up caffeine—and paused mid-sip.

Something had changed.

It was subtle at first, the way a shift in barometric pressure might be. The typing from the adjacent cubicles slowed. Conversations that had been flowing naturally began to falter, words trailing off into anticipatory silence. Jessica set down her mug and straightened in her chair, her instincts prickling. She’d learned to read office atmospheres the way a sailor reads the sky, and right now, the sky was darkening.

A murmur began to ripple through the floor. It started somewhere near the elevator bank, a low buzz of voices that seemed to spread outward like a wave. Jessica caught fragments—someone’s nervous laugh, a whispered “he’s here,” the distinctive sound of someone hastily minimizing browser windows despite the fact that their work should have nothing to hide.

Her stomach clenched.

She knew, before she allowed herself to consciously acknowledge it, exactly what this meant. Exactly who had just arrived.

Mark.

The name surfaced in her mind like something toxic, and she found herself gripping the armrest of her ergonomic chair with unnecessary force. She forced her hand to relax, forced her expression into professional neutrality, and returned her attention to her monitors. The numbers swam before her eyes, refusing to coalesce into meaning.

It was absurd, really, the way the entire office responded to him now. The way everyone responded to him. She remembered—and the memory was knife-sharp, infuriatingly clear—the man Mark had been before. Before the incident. Before everything changed.

He’d been nobody. Less than nobody. Mark Fullerton had been the kind of employee who did just enough to avoid termination, who arrived precisely on time and left precisely on time, whose quarterly reviews were exercises in diplomatic phrasing that all boiled down to the same assessment: adequate. Meets expectations. Shows no initiative. She remembered thinking, more than once, that he was the human equivalent of background noise—present, technically functional, but contributing nothing of value.

She’d told him as much, more than once. During a team meeting, when his half-hearted proposal had been met with the lukewarm approval of people too polite to say what they were thinking. Jessica had never been too polite. “With all due respect,” she’d said, though she’d meant none, “perhaps if we held ourselves to higher standards than ‘good enough,’ we wouldn’t need to have these conversations.” She’d been looking at Mark when she said it. Everyone knew she’d been looking at Mark.

He’d flushed red and said nothing, and she’d felt a small, mean satisfaction at his silence.

Then, several months ago, he’d collapsed at his desk.

Jessica had been in the break room when it happened, but she’d heard about it within minutes. Mark Fullerton, unconscious on the floor of his cubicle, an ambulance called, the whole spectacle of paramedics navigating stretchers through the cube farm. There had been gossip, of course. Speculation about stress, about heart conditions, about the karmic inevitability of mediocrity catching up with itself. And she ... she had suggested that he had faked the incident to get out of work early. She hadn’t really meant it, but the idea was picked up by the rest of the floor, and a healthy sense of skepticism about his actual health started to become part of the office gossip.

He’d been gone for a few days. When he was admitted to the hospital for observation, Jessica had felt a bit of guilt for perpetuating the more vicious rumors, but ultimately ... who cared that a nobody loser actually had a serious health problem? But ... when he came back, everything was immediately different.

She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when she’d first noticed the change. It might have been the way he walked, as though the floor owed him something. It might have been the set of his shoulders, suddenly suggesting competence rather than defeat. But mostly, it was the way people started talking about him.

“Did you hear what he said in the executive meeting?”

“He predicted the Harmon account would close three weeks early. Three weeks exactly.”

“Remember when he said the Peterson deal would fall through unless we restructured the commission model? Everyone thought he was crazy, but—”

Jessica did remember. She remembered with uncomfortable clarity the moment Mark had stood up in the all-hands meeting and announced, with absolute conviction, that the industry was about to experience a paradigm shift in customer acquisition. He’d described it in specific terms—percentages, timeframes, market movements—and the room had listened with varying degrees of skepticism. Gloria Winters, his direct supervisor, had looked like she was sucking on something sour.

Then it had happened. Exactly as he’d said it would.

She remembered his next prediction, and the one after that. She remembered the string of impossible sales he’d closed, prospects that had been written off as losses suddenly becoming not just customers but advocates, signing contracts with enthusiasm that bordered on the evangelical. She remembered watching, with a growing sense of unease that she couldn’t explain, as senior leadership began to treat Mark Fullerton like he’d descended from some corporate Mount Olympus with tablets of pure profit margin. The leaderboards that she’d dominated since she’d been hired suddenly started showing Mark dominating at the top in nearly every metric.

The salary increase had been obscene. They’d created an entirely new position for him—”Strategic Consultant,” a title so vague it could mean anything—and now he only came in when there was a crisis. Twice a month, maybe three times if things were particularly chaotic. The rest of the time, he did ... whatever it was he did. No one questioned it. No one dared.

He’d become the Office God, and the transformation had been so complete that Jessica sometimes caught herself questioning her own memories of who he’d been before. Surely she was misremembering his mediocrity. Surely there had been signs of this brilliance that she’d simply failed to notice.

But no. She was certain. She knew what she’d seen, what she’d experienced. Mark Fullerton had been a loser, and now he was untouchable, and the dissonance between these two realities made her head ache.

What made it worse—what made it unbearable—was what had happened to everyone who’d ever given him a hard time.

The office had its own ecosystem, its own food chain, and Jessica had always ensured she was positioned near the top. She was talented, driven, willing to put in the hours that others wouldn’t. Her skirts were always perfectly pressed, her suits tailored to accentuate her figure without crossing into unprofessional territory. She caught her reflection in her darkened second monitor—tall, even seated, with long black hair she straightened religiously every morning, blue eyes that could freeze out incompetence at fifty paces. She knew she was beautiful. She also knew that her beauty was secondary to her competence, a fortunate bonus rather than a primary asset.

Or it had been.

Gloria Winters had been the first to fall. Mark’s direct supervisor, who also happened to be her supervisor, the woman who’d spent years micromanaging his performance reviews into oblivion, had experienced what could only be described as a professional collapse. One day she was denying his promotion; the next, she was deferring to him in meetings with an eagerness that bordered on desperation. Jessica had watched it happen with a mixture of horror and schadenfreude that curdled into pure horror when she realized she might be next.

She had been next.

Her climb up the corporate ladder, which had been proceeding with gratifying inevitability, had simply ... stopped. Promotions that should have been hers went to less qualified candidates. Projects she’d spearheaded were quietly reassigned. Her opinions, once sought and valued, began to be dismissed with polite condescension. She’d gone from rising star to office pariah in the span of weeks, and the worst part—the truly maddening part—was that no one would tell her why.

She knew why, of course. She knew it in her bones. It was because of how she’d treated Mark. It had to be. But knowing and proving were different things, and Mark had never said a word to her about it. Never confronted her, never accused her, never given her the satisfaction of a direct conflict she could win.

He just smiled, that infuriating smile, and the world rearranged itself around him.

Jessica shifted in her chair, tugging absently at the hem of her skirt. It was shorter than she usually wore—than she used to wear—but lately she’d found herself dressing differently, without quite understanding why. The form-fitting suits that showed off her curves, the heels that made her legs look endless, the way she’d started leaving one extra button undone on her blouses. It felt right, somehow. Appropriate to her new position.

Her new position. She didn’t like thinking about that too directly.

The obvious solution, the rational response to professional sabotage, was to leave. Find another job. Take her skills and her work ethic and her immaculate resume to a competitor who would appreciate what she brought to the table. She’d thought about it, of course. She’d thought about it obsessively, during those first terrible weeks when her career had begun its inexorable slide.

But every time she tried to imagine actually doing it—updating her resume, reaching out to recruiters, interviewing at other firms—a cold certainty settled over her. It wouldn’t work. No one else would hire her. Her reputation, somehow, had been poisoned beyond these walls, and the only place she could work was here, in this office, under these conditions.

The alternative was ... she didn’t like to think about the alternative. But the thought intruded anyway, unwelcome and strangely specific: if she left, the only work she’d be qualified for was selling her body. The idea should have been absurd. She had a degree, credentials, years of experience. But the conviction remained, lodged in her mind like a jagged splinter, impossible to extract.

So she stayed. She came in at seven-fifteen and processed her reports and tried not to think about how everything had changed, or how much she hated Mark Fullerton, or how her body seemed to tense with something that wasn’t quite fear whenever she heard his name.

The murmur in the office had reached her section now. She could hear people straightening at their desks, could feel the collective shift in attention that meant he was approaching. Jessica kept her eyes fixed on her monitor, refusing to look, refusing to give him the satisfaction.

Footsteps. Unhurried, confident, approaching her cubicle with an inevitability that made her skin crawl.

She knew what came next. She always knew what came next, now that she understood her role in this new hierarchy. The Office Slut—that was the term that drifted through her mind, clinical and degrading and somehow accurate. She was Mark’s, in ways she couldn’t quite articulate but couldn’t deny. Available. That was the word. She was supposed to be available to him, here in the office, whenever and however he wanted her.

The thought should have enraged her. Part of her—a distant, muffled part—insisted that it was wrong, that this wasn’t who she was, that Jessica Oberdeen did not make her body available to anyone. But that part was quiet, overwhelmed by the larger certainty that this was simply how things were now. Her job description included this, didn’t it? Her duties. Her responsibilities.

The footsteps stopped at the entrance to her cubicle.

“Jessica!”

His voice was cheerful. It was always cheerful now, carrying that easy confidence of someone who knew, absolutely knew, that the universe would bend to accommodate him. She forced herself to look up, to meet his eyes, to arrange her features into something that might pass for professional neutrality.

Mark Fullerton stood there, looking like he’d just stepped out of a catalog for corporate success. His suit was better cut than it used to be. His posture radiated assurance. He was smiling at her with the warm, genuine pleasure of someone greeting an old friend, and the disconnect between that smile and everything she knew about their history made her feel slightly ill.

“Good morning,” he said. “Hard at work as always, I see.”

Her stomach dropped. It plummeted like a stone thrown from a great height, and she felt her carefully constructed professional mask threaten to crack. She knew, with the bone-deep certainty of repeated experience, what was coming next. What he would ask of her, or tell her, or simply expect. She was his, after all. His Office Slut. That was her role now, her function, the purpose she served in his newly ordered world.

She hated him.

She opened her mouth to respond, to say something—anything—that might delay the inevitable, and found that the words wouldn’t come. They never did, anymore. Not when he was looking at her like that. Not when he was so clearly enjoying her discomfort, her helplessness, her complete and utter subjugation to whatever he wanted.

“Mark,” she managed. Just his name. Just the acknowledgment that he existed, that he was here, that her day—her carefully structured, obsessively controlled day—was about to be derailed by whatever whim had brought him to her cubicle.

He kept smiling. Of course he did.

“Jessica,” he said, and she hated the way he said her name now, like he owned it. “We need to talk.”

She swiveled her chair to face him, keeping her spine straight, her hands folded on her lap. Professional. Always professional. “Of course. What can I do for you?”