(Marcus)
I'd worked at Wolfe Enterprises for six years before Zara Morgan taught me what it felt like to be beaten by someone who didn't even know we were playing.
That was the part I couldn't stand. She hadn't schemed her way past me. She hadn't traded on the photograph or leaned on the CEO or done any of the things I could have used against her. She'd simply been better at the work, in a room full of people who cared about the work, and the industry had put her name in every headline while my formal note sat in a file where nobody would ever read it again.
I don't lose to talent. Talent is a thing you can outmaneuver. It walks into rooms unguarded, trusting the work to speak, and it never sees the man who's spent six years learning that the work is the last thing that decides anything
