All Chapters of The Billionaire's Forbidden Weakness (where the ice breaks): Chapter 1 - Chapter 4

She'd been standing outside for four minutes. Nathalia knew this because she'd checked her phone twice — 9:51, then 9:53 — and was now actively arguing with herself about checking it a third time. She didn't. She shoved it back into her bag and looked up at the building instead, which was honestly worse. Cole Industries. Eighty-three floors. She'd looked it up. Black glass all the way to the top, the kind of building that didn't care whether the sun was out because it made its own light — or rather, it took everyone else's and kept it. The Cole Industries logo sat above the entrance in brushed gold lettering that was somehow both understated and the loudest thing on the block. No unnecessary flourishes. Just the name. Just the fact of it. Nathalia had grown up in a town where the tallest building was the library, and even that only had four floors and smelled like carpet cleaner. She crossed the street. The revolving door was heavier than it looked. She nearly didn't push

She set four alarms. This was not something Nathalia would ever admit to another human being but she set four alarms — five-fifteen, five-twenty, five-twenty-five, and five-thirty as the final threat — because she had learned in university that she was the kind of person who could negotiate with a single alarm in her sleep and wake up forty minutes later genuinely believing she'd made a reasonable decision. She was at the forty-second floor by six thirty-eight. Seven minutes early for a six forty-five that was already itself early, which meant she was essentially early for being early, which felt both excessive and completely necessary. The floor was different at this hour. Quieter in a way that had texture — not empty, not asleep, just stripped back to its essentials. The overhead lights hadn't fully brightened yet, running at something lower and cooler, and the city outside the windows was doing that particular early morning thing where it looked almost soft, the skyline blurr