Chapter 19

JENNIE POV: 

The door to Wing A closed with a heavy, muted thud that felt way too final.

Jennie stood in the center of her massive, dark bedroom, her back pressed against the lacquered wood. The silence of her room didn’t feel peaceful; it felt like a vacuum, sucking all the oxygen right out of her lungs.

Slowly, her knees gave out a little, and she slid down the back of the door until she was sitting on the cool hardwood floor, her custom Chanel dress bunching up around her knees in expensive, iced-pearl folds. She didn’t care about the fabric. She didn’t care about the textile mills in Lyon anymore.

She reached up with both hands, her fingers trembling as she pressed her palms against her face. Her lips were still tingling. They felt warm, completely swollen, and heavy with the residual taste of Lalisa Manoban.

“Is that what we’re calling it? A corporate glitch?”

Lisa’s voice echoed in her head—rough, deep, and laced with that tiny hint of bitterness that made Jennie’s chest physically ache.

“Stupid,” Jennie whispered into the dark room, her voice cracking. “You are so stupid, Jennie Kim.”

She regretted it instantly. The second the words “system failure” and “anomaly” had left her mouth in the kitchen, she had wanted to reach into the air, grab them, and swallow them back down. Seeing the light dim in Lisa’s eyes—the way that intense, protective heat had instantly cooled down into a polite, guarded wall—had felt like a literal punch to her ribs. Lisa had looked so vulnerable standing there, stripped of her usual jokes, just waiting for Jennie to be brave.

And Jennie had chosen to hide behind the contract. Like a coward.

The absolute irony of it made a sharp, breathless laugh escape her throat. Her parents didn’t want a fake merger. Her mother wasn’t looking for a calculated public relations stunt. If Jennie walked downstairs right now and told her parents that she was actually, genuinely falling for Lalisa Manoban, they wouldn’t be angry—they would be absolutely thrilled. A real relationship meant a permanent consolidation of power. It meant the shares were locked down forever, bound by actual devotion instead of a fragile legal document.

Her parents wanted this to be real. The public wanted this to be real.

The boundaries weren’t there to protect her from the board. They were there to protect her from herself.

Jennie pulled her legs close to her chest, resting her chin on her knees as she stared at the glowing lights of the Seoul skyline. The terrifying truth was that she had never operated without a strategy before. Everything in her life had a timeline, an optimization matrix, and a projected return on investment. But Lisa? Lisa was a complete, unquantifiable variable. She was a girl who lived in leather jackets, wore NASA hoodies, and managed to completely shatter Jennie’s icy executive armor with a single look.

Falling in love with her fake fiancée wasn’t a business risk; it was an emotional freefall. If Jennie let those boundaries drop, if she admitted that the rooftop kiss wasn’t a glitch, she would be completely defenseless. She wouldn’t be the CEO of execution anymore. She would just be a girl entirely at the mercy of how Lisa looked at her.

She was keeping the boundaries up because she was absolutely terrified of how easily Lisa could break her.

“Optimized parameters,” Jennie muttered, a single, frustrated tear slipping down her cheek and disappearing into the silk of her dress. She wiped it away furiously with the back of her hand, her diamond engagement ring catching the moonlight and throwing a cold, sharp glare against the wall.

She had to maintain the data. She had to play the ice queen for five more months, even if it meant starving her own heart to death in the process.

With a heavy sigh, Jennie forced herself to stand up. Her body felt exhausted, heavy with the mental strain of a hundred fake smiles. She walked over to her walk-in closet, unzipping the aggressive Chanel dress and letting it fall to the floor like discarded armor.

She needed comfort. She needed to feel safe.

She walked over to the armchair near her bed and picked up the massive, oversized charcoal hoodie she had stolen from the common area earlier that week. The one Lisa had been looking for. Jennie slid it over her head, drowning in the thick fabric. Instantly, the scent of rich sandalwood, mint, and pure Lisa enveloped her, holding her tightly in the dark.

Jennie walked over to her bed, pulling the duvet over her head, and curled into a tight ball. She opened her iPad, the bright screen illuminating her face as the Tokyo logistics report loaded into view. The numbers blurred together.

She was the CEO of execution, but as she lay there in Lisa’s hoodie, holding her own hand to pretend the warmth was still there, Jennie knew she had completely failed her own audit. The market hadn’t just fluctuated tonight. It had crashed. And no matter how many boundaries she built to protect her own heart, she was already entirely bankrupt.

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