Chapter 1 - THE ROAST
"She’s just not wired for the real world," Lila said, dabbing her mascara with a monogrammed linen napkin. "I mean, look at her. Thirty years old, pulling espresso shots for minimum wage, living in a glorified closet with a hot plate. Some people are born to lead, and some people are born to wipe down counters."
The entire head table erupted in laughter.
I stood ten feet away in my plain black trousers and catering apron, balancing a silver tray laden with twenty-four mini shrimp cocktails. My arms were shaking. Not from the weight of the silver, but from the raw, sickening humiliation vibrating through my bones.
To save Lila twelve hundred dollars on her catering bill, I had clocked in at 6:00 a.m., unloaded three delivery vans, polished two hundred crystal glasses, and spent the last five hours on my feet while her bridesmaids treated me like an invisible ghost.
"Lila, stop, that’s so mean," her maid of honor, Chloe, giggled, clearly not wanting her to stop at all.
"It’s not mean if it’s true!" Lila tossed her head back, her diamond teardrop earrings catching the chandelier light. "I try to help her. God knows I try. But when you lack ambition, you lack ambition. Some of us make six figures building enterprise financial software, and some of us burn oat milk."
She turned toward the man sitting on her right.
He hadn't laughed. He hadn't touched his champagne. He sat impeccably still in a bespoke charcoal suit that made every rented tuxedo in the room look like tissue paper. His dark hair was threaded with silver at the temples, his jaw sharp enough to cut glass, his steel-gray eyes fixed entirely on Lila.
Lila thought he was a nobody. When my brother-in-law Jake introduced him before the ceremony as an old college acquaintance who worked in "digital infrastructure," Lila hadn't even looked up from her phone. She’d rolled her eyes, handed him a seating card at the far end of the head table, and whispered to Jake that he looked like an out-of-work bouncer.
She didn't know his name was Elias Voss.
She didn't know he was the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Voss Fintech—the multi-billion-dollar firm where Lila had been claiming to be a rising Senior Product Manager for the last eleven months.
"Don't you agree?" Lila leaned closer to him, smelling of expensive white florals and cheap arrogance. "You work in tech, right? You know what it’s like dealing with people who just don't have the mental horsepower to keep up."
Elias set his fork down with deliberate, surgical precision. The silver tapped the bone china with a crisp *clink* that somehow cut right through the booming bass of the reception DJ.
"No," Elias said. His voice was low, gravelly, and commanded immediate silence. "I can't say I do."
Lila blinked, caught off guard. "Oh. Well, I just mean—"
"I’m curious, Lila," Elias continued, turning his full, terrifying gaze directly onto her. "If your sister lacks so much horsepower, why is it her name listed in the Git commits for the Voss Core-Four routing engine?"
Lila’s smile froze. The color drained from her cheeks so fast it looked like someone had pulled a plug beneath her skin. "I... what?"
"You heard me," Elias said calmly. He reached inside his breast pocket, pulled out an embossed business card, and set it squarely beside her champagne flute. "I came here today to see the brilliant engineer behind the proprietary algorithmic pipeline you submitted under your portfolio last quarter."
He paused, his eyes drifting over to me.
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"Imagine my surprise," Elias said, "when I discover you didn't write a single line of that code. And imagine my absolute disgust at watching you mock the person who did."
***
