Page 16 of Obey

Apparently, he is not joking.

“Welcome to the altar, Sloane. Try not to bleed too much your first week.”

My mouth opens to fire back, but before I can, he already turns, calling over his shoulder. "Thirty minutes until the first meeting. Bring your coffee. Or don't. I like a challenge."

Before I can respond, he disappears into his office, leaving me with a stack of paperwork and the memory of his teeth catching his lower lip.

five

The Altar

I haven't even finished sorting through the security protocols Jace left on my desk before Nate strikes.

No hello. No small talk. Just a stack of folders thudding onto my glass desk with surgical precision. Papers spill, color-coded tabs jutting like warning flags.

“These,” he says, tone flat, “reconciled and prioritized. Thirty minutes.”

I glance at the mess before flicking through the stack.

It's not work, it's sabotage. Duplicate entries, half-filled spreadsheets, and three different people trying to schedule the same investor dinner. Somebody has made an impressive mess of this, and apparently, I'm expected to fix it in thirty minutes.

“Thirty?”

His gaze pins me like a scalpel. “Problem?”

Yes. The problem is, I’d like to snap this Montblanc pen in half and drive it straight through his perfect tie knot.

But I keep that thought to myself and give him a wry smile. “No problem at all, Mr. Blackwell.”

He leaves, coat flaring, the faint trace of his cologne lacing the air.

The executive floor is silent except for the soft hum of the jazz system and the click of my nails against the keys on my keyboard. Sound-dampening walls mean no one hears anything you don’t want them to—and right now, I kind of want to scream.

Ten minutes in, the pattern is obvious. He did this on purpose.

Through the smoked glass wall, I catch glimpses of his silhouette working away in the middle office. I’ll give him this: his sense of business is flawless, but if he thinks a few poorly scheduled dinners and disorganized papers are enough to scare me off, then he’s in for a surprise.

Fire, meet gasoline.

I finish reconciling the folders, then turn my attention to his calendar. The duplicated invitations are easy enough to identify, and the scheduling conflicts practically announce themselves. By the time I'm finished, I've corrected the entries connected to his little test and drafted the necessary updates.

Twenty minutes later, I rise, heels echoing against the polished floor, and stride into Nate’s office. His space is as ruthless as he is—black glass desk, everything aligned with military precision. He doesn’t look up until I set the corrected stack down.

“Done.”

He flips through, eyes squinting behind his glasses. He leans closer, cologne dark and musky, tailored for men who expect the world to bend. His presence presses in, sharp enough to raise goosebumps on my arms.

Finally, he sets the papers down. “Efficient.”

One word after twenty minutes of cleaning up sabotage he created specifically to test me.

And somehow that irritates me more than the test itself.

Tuesday afternoon, I'm convinced Nate Blackwell was sent from the fifth layer of purgatory to test the limits of human endurance.

Every assignment comes with another ridiculous deadline. I meet each one, only to get the same single-word response.

Efficient.