The Tempest Proposal

I’d been grinding for a full month to make my position permanent.

The last all-nighter was finally over. I stared at the proposal on my screen—flawless, perfect—and let out a breath I’d been holding for weeks. The caffeine that had been thundering through my veins finally gave way to exhaustion. I slumped forward, resting my head on my arms, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep right there at my desk.

I woke to a sharp, piercing shriek.

My head snapped up. The scene in front of me sent a jolt of ice through my veins, freezing the blood in my heart.

Mark—my boyfriend of three years, my mentor at the firm—had a line of glowing, translucent text hovering above his head:

【THE DEVOTED HERO: Logic Optional. Utterly Whipped.】

And next to him, Ava, the new intern, had her own label:

【THE CHOSEN ONE: The Saintly Martyr. Weaponizes Tears.】



1

Before I could even begin to process the sheer absurdity of it all, it happened.

Splash—

Ava, holding a steaming cup of black coffee, stumbled. Her hand slipped with a theatrical "oops," and the entire contents of the cup cascaded directly into the cooling vents of my laptop.

A wisp of blue smoke curled into the air. The acrid smell of burning electronics, mixed with the cheap, bitter scent of office coffee, assaulted my nostrils.

My screen flickered twice, then went completely black.

A month of my life’s work, my entire future at this company, was trapped inside that dead machine.

The office fell deathly silent.

Tears were already streaming down Ava’s cherubic, innocent face.

“Oh my god, Nora, I’m so, so sorry… I… I really didn’t mean to…”

She bit her lip, fat tears rolling down her cheeks, but her gaze darted past me, landing helplessly on Mark. It was the look of a startled fawn, a direct hit to the glowing tag above his head: 【The Devoted Hero】.

Mark’s protective instincts flared so intensely you could almost feel the heat from them. He rushed over, but his anger was aimed at Ava.

“Ava, how could you be so careless?” he snapped.

A sliver of relief went through me. For a second.

Then he whipped around to face me. His handsome features, the face I knew better than my own, were twisted with blame and impatience.

“Nora! It was an accident. Don’t give her a hard time about it!”

A buzzing filled my ears. Give her a hard time?

I hadn’t even opened my mouth.

“What’s the point of blaming her now?” he continued, his brow furrowed with a frustration aimed squarely at me. “The presentation is this afternoon! What about the proposal? Your entire month’s work was on there, and now it’s gone!”

I looked at him, then at Ava, who was sobbing as if she were the one who had just lost everything. The whole scene was so ridiculous, it was almost funny.

One month. Thirty days. I had survived on four hours of sleep a night, chugging coffee like water, to single-handedly tackle the bid for "Project Tempest," a project so notoriously difficult no one else dared to touch it.

And Mark. My mentor. My boyfriend.

He’d paid lip service to how worried he was about me, how much he admired my work ethic. But now, in the moment I needed his support the most, he was tearing me down to protect an intern who’d been here for three days—an intern who had just destroyed everything.

Ava was still sniffling beside him, delivering the final, perfectly timed blow.

“Nora… I can pay for the laptop… but the proposal… it’s all my fault. Maybe… maybe I should just…” She trailed off, but her meaning was crystal clear.

She’d replace the computer.

But the loss of the work? That was on me. After all, I was the one who hadn’t protected my own data.

Coworkers had started to gather, murmuring and pointing at the disaster.

“Well, she’s screwed. The client briefing is at two.”

“Seriously, Nora. For something that important, you’d think she would’ve made a backup.”

The looks they gave me were a mixture of pity and, worse, a smug, schadenfreude-fueled excitement.

Just as the weight of it all was about to suffocate me, a thought struck me like a bolt of lightning.

The cloud.

Late last night, as a final precaution, I had uploaded a compressed file of the final version to my personal cloud drive.

The will to survive instantly overrode the heartbreak and the humiliation.

I lifted my chin and met Mark’s disappointed gaze. My heart felt like a block of ice. He was still lecturing me.

“Nora, are you going to say something? Are you mute? This isn’t the time for a tantrum!”

I stared at the glowing words above his head and felt a bitter laugh rise in my throat.

【The Devoted Hero】.

Fine. Just fine.

Let’s see just how stupid love can make you.

2

“I’m going to the restroom.”

I dropped the sentence into the suffocating silence and, without another glance at them, grabbed my phone and walked out of the office.

Behind me, I heard Mark let out an annoyed “Tsk.” He must have thought I was storming off in a huff. “See? That’s the attitude I’m talking about. Forget it, Ava, stop crying. I’ll figure something out.”

My fingers tightened around my phone, nails digging into my palm. The sharp pain was the only thing keeping me grounded, keeping me sane.

I ducked into the cold, empty stairwell, leaning against the concrete wall as my trembling fingers navigated to my cloud drive app.

There it was. A single file named “Project Tempest - Final Draft.”

The download progress bar crawled across the screen, each percentage point feeling like an eternity.

Just then, through the wall, I heard hushed voices from the breakroom. It was Ava, her voice thick with a put-upon sob.

“...I really didn’t mean it. I don’t know why Nora reacted like that, like… like I was trying to sabotage her or something.”

“Mark, am I just too clumsy? Did I make things worse for you again?”

A few of the office gossips chimed in with their support.

“Oh, honey, don’t worry about it. Everyone makes mistakes when they’re new.”

“Exactly. Nora is totally overreacting. She’s always been so full of herself, walking around like she owns the place just because she’s dating the creative director. The slightest little thing sets her off.”

“Right? I asked her to grab me a coffee last week and you would’ve thought I’d asked for her firstborn. What’s her deal?”

My heart sank. I held my breath.

And then, I heard Mark’s voice. It was a sigh, laced with a kind of weary indulgence I had never heard before.

“She’s just like that. I’ve spoiled her, I guess. You’ll have to forgive her.”

“She’s been under a lot of pressure with this project. When she gets stressed, she loses control.”

“Ava, don’t take it personally. On her behalf, I apologize.”

Boom.

The last thread holding me together snapped.

Spoiled?

High-strung and out of control?

So that’s who I was to him. In his words, I was just some irrational, shrewish girlfriend. Our three years together, in the eyes of our colleagues, were nothing more than leverage I used to get ahead.

And Ava—the person who ruined my work, the cause of all this—was “Ava,” the one who needed his protection, his personal apology.

How intimate.

It struck me then that Mark hadn’t called me by my nickname in a long, long time. More often than not, it was just a flat, perfunctory “Nora.”

My phone screen lit up. Download Complete.

I took a deep, shuddering breath, wiped away a tear I hadn’t realized had fallen, and composed my face into a mask of calm. Then, I pushed open the door to the breakroom.

The conversation stopped cold. The atmosphere crackled with awkwardness.

Ava’s eyes were still red-rimmed. When she saw me, she instinctively shrank behind Mark, a practiced movement she seemed to have perfected.

I ignored them, walking straight to the water cooler to fill a glass. Then I turned around and held up my phone for Ava to see. The screen displayed a freshly started audio recording.

“Ava, you said you’d pay for my laptop, correct?” I asked, my voice as placid as if I were discussing the weather.

Ava froze, then nodded jerkily. “Y-yes! Of course, Nora! I’ll definitely pay for it!”

“Good,” I said, the smile on my face widening. “It was the latest top-spec MacBook Pro. The price on the Apple store website is two thousand, three hundred and ninety-nine dollars.”

“Will you be wiring the money, or paying in cash?”

“Oh, and by the way,” I added sweetly, “just to avoid any future confusion, I’ve recorded our little agreement.”

The color drained from Ava’s face.

The other people in the room stared, their expressions shifting.

“Twenty-four hundred bucks? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“She’s an intern. She makes, what, three thousand a month? How is she supposed to pay that?”

Just moments ago, she’d been so eager to take responsibility. Now that the bill had come due, her saintly mask was cracking. Her lips trembled, unable to form a single word.

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