Chapter Text
“The new manager is supposed to start today,” Gakane said, setting one coffee in front of Yuder and another in front of Kanna.
Kanna accepted hers with both hands and a grimace that had nothing to do with the heat. “Another La Orr, I heard.”
Gakane’s expression collapsed.
“Don’t make that face,” Kanna said, though she was making nearly the same one.
“It can’t be worse than the last two, right?” Gakane asked, with the fragile hope of someone who knew better and had decided to ask anyway.
“Don’t jinx us.”
“I’m not jinxing us. I’m trying to be optimistic.”
“That’s how people jinx things.”
Yuder took a sip of his coffee while they argued. It was heavy with cream and sugar, the way Kanna kept bringing it despite the fact that he had told her more than once that it was unnecessary. She had only given him an unreadable look and continued handing it to him this way whenever she and Gakane came back with drinks, a habit Gakane had now picked up.
Across the office, several people were pretending not to listen while listening very intently.
That was the kind of morning it was.
A new manager, especially one from the owner’s family, was enough to make everyone uneasy. The company belonged to Keilusa La Orr in all the ways that mattered, even if the board and legal documents were more complicated. Everyone understood how appointments happened here. Everyone also understood that being related to competence was not the same thing as possessing it.
Katchian and Kiolle had taught them that.
“You think he’ll make us line up again?” someone asked from the next cluster of desks, not quite quietly enough.
Gakane winced. Kanna shut her eyes as if personally pained by the memory.
Katchian had liked greetings. Formal ones. Staff lined up in order of seniority, work delayed until he had received the proper amount of attention, introductions repeated if someone failed to sound impressed enough. He corrected reports by asking who had made them, then asking why no one else had stopped them before they reached his desk. By the end of his first month, people had learned to attach names to nothing unless forced.
“At least if he makes us line up, he’ll know we exist,” someone else muttered.
“Katchian knew we existed.”
“I meant compared to Kiolle.”
Kiolle had been easier in some ways. Worse in others. He had not demanded greetings because he had barely seemed to notice the department was staffed by individual people. He came late, left early, forgot names, misplaced approvals, and treated every delayed project as though it had emerged naturally from the air rather than from his own untouched inbox. Under Kiolle, being remembered usually meant something had gone wrong.
Between the two of them, the department had developed a talent for anticipating inconvenience.
“Maybe he’ll just be normal,” Gakane said.
Kanna looked at him.
Gakane sighed. “Fine. I hear it.”
Yuder set his coffee down and unlocked his monitor. “It’s not useful to decide before he arrives.”
Kanna leaned sideways in her chair to look at him. “That sounds reasonable. I don’t trust it.”
“It’s not trust. It’s lack of data.”
“That’s worse than optimism, actually,” Gakane said.
Yuder ignored that and opened the folder he had finished organizing before leaving the previous night.
Current workload by team. Budget status and outstanding approvals. Staffing gaps. Vendor delays. Pending contracts. Project risks ranked by severity and whether they required managerial authorization. The usual materials, arranged in the usual way, because new managers always asked for the same things once they realized enthusiasm was not a substitute for information.
He had grown tired of watching three departments panic through half a day while pretending the files were not scattered across six different drives. It was simpler to prepare them a few days early.
The murmur near the entrance shifted.
Someone sat up straighter. Someone else minimized a chat window so quickly it might as well have been a confession. Kanna stopped stirring her coffee.
Yuder continued checking the spreadsheet in front of him.
When the glass doors opened, no one clapped for attention or called the staff toward the conference area. No one asked them to smile through the familiar waste of half an hour.
The new manager entered with Nathan Zuckerman from executive administration and one of the senior HR managers beside him. That much Yuder saw in the reflection on his monitor before he decided he did not need to turn around.
It was a small decision, and apparently not one everyone shared. The office quieted in fragments. Chairs creaked. A few people stood halfway, then seemed to realize no one had told them to. The hesitation passed awkwardly through the room and found nowhere to settle.
“Good morning,” the new manager said. “I’m Kishiar La Orr. I’ll be working with you from today.” His voice was warm enough to carry and light enough not to demand applause.
Yuder’s hand paused on the mouse.
Only for a second.
The familiarity was brief enough to dismiss. A tone, perhaps. A cadence half-caught through the low shuffle of the office. Nothing he could justify naming.
Around him, people exchanged glances, trying to decide what kind of omen that was supposed to be. The greeting had been easy, almost casual, as if he did not expect the whole department to stop breathing just because he had entered it.
Then the new manager turned toward Nathan, already moving toward the empty office that had belonged to Kiolle and, before that, Katchian.
“Quarterly approvals first, then. I’d like the unresolved items separated by whether they need executive sign-off or only departmental review.”
Lower now. Quieter. The words meant for one person rather than the whole floor.
Yuder’s hand stayed where it was. A slow, unwelcome heat slid down his spine and settled low in his gut.
He had not mistaken it.
The recognition was plain and useless. That voice did not belong here, under fluorescent office lights with coffee cooling beside his keyboard and Kanna sitting close enough to kick his chair if she wanted his attention.
It belonged to darkness, to headphones pressed warm over his ears, to the low, intimate hush of a room after midnight, when he had been too tired to sleep and too restless to keep scrolling through articles that all said the same things in different fonts.
He had clicked on the first recording because the title had been vague and elegant, and because “NSFW” had seemed, at a glance, like one of those broad internet warnings that meant mature themes, adult language, perhaps something emotionally heavy.
The speaker’s voice had caught his attention before anything else. The control of it. The breath placed exactly where it needed to be. The way silence settled between words without becoming empty. The low register that could turn amused, coaxing, sharp, or soft with almost no visible effort.
A technically impressive voice, he had thought. Well suited for ASMR, and unusually effective at loosening the restless tension that kept his mind awake long after his body had grown tired.
The recording had begun suggestively enough to match the warning: low-voiced, intimate, built around the slow pressure of being addressed too closely. Gentle direction. Warm approval. A private tone that made heat gather before Yuder had fully decided what to call it. He had followed the rhythm more than the scenario at first, the measured breaths and deliberate pauses easing something restless at the back of his mind while stirring something lower.
Then the voice dropped further, still warm, still amused, but the words themselves became too direct to mistake for atmosphere.
“That’s it… breathe for me. Let my voice settle inside you, slow and deep. You’re being so good for me, so perfectly attentive. What a lovely, shameless thing you become, aching so sweetly just because I asked you to listen.”
It took Yuder an extra second to register the obscenity of it. The voice had carried the words so elegantly that his body understood before his mind did.
Yuder paused the recording long enough to read the description again and understand what the warning label had been trying to tell him. For several seconds, he sat there in the dark with the headphones loose around his ears.
Then he pressed play.
Across the office, the same voice said, “And the vendor issues?”
Yuder blinked once. The spreadsheet on his monitor returned in clean rows and columns.
It was a perfectly ordinary question, asked in a perfectly ordinary office, as though that same voice had not, only the night before, praised some unseen listener into needy obedience.
This was manageable, he decided.
The conclusion arrived too quickly to be trusted, but he accepted it anyway. A voice was only a voice. Recognition did not require reaction. The new manager was across the office, speaking to Nathan about quarterly approvals in a completely ordinary context. He was not speaking to Yuder. He did not know Yuder. There was no reason for anything to become complicated.
“Do we have those summaries yet?” the new manager asked.
Nathan answered, “The previous handoff packet was incomplete. I believe the department was still compiling–”
“They’re done,” Ever said from two desks over.
The room shifted again. Yuder closed his eyes for half a second as Kanna and Gakane both looked at him, but Ever had apparently heard only a question in need of an answer and provided it with perfect helpfulness.
Nathan paused. “They’re done?”
“Yes. Yuder prepared them. Workload, budget, staffing, vendor issues, approvals, and project risks…”
Ever trailed off near the end of the list, finally glancing toward him as what she had done seemed to catch up with her. A brief, belated apology crossed her face.
A brief silence followed, not long enough to be dramatic, only the natural pause of someone adjusting to new information. Yuder felt it anyway: the office turning toward him in small increments, attention arriving a moment before the voice did.
“Yuder Aile?”
The sound of his name should not have mattered. It was a professional acknowledgment, spoken in a professional office by a manager who had just learned which employee had prepared the necessary reports.
Yuder looked up.
Kishiar La Orr was facing him now.
That was a new problem, which Yuder had not yet had time to consider properly.
The voice would have been enough on its own. It did not need to belong to someone so plainly, inconveniently attractive. His hair was a pale gold that looked almost golden under the office lights and his smile was courteous, but his eyes were sharper than the smile, red enough to hold the gaze for half a second too long.
Yuder did not let himself look for longer than that.
“Yes,” he said. His own voice sounded normal, at least.
Kishiar’s smile warmed by a fraction. “That was well anticipated. Thank you, Yuder.”
The words settled low in his body before he could stop them. Yuder gave a short nod. “It was standard preparation.”
“Standard, perhaps,” Kishiar said. “Still useful.”
The words were mild. The kind of praise any manager might give when an employee saved him time on his first morning. Nothing in his tone suggested anything beyond professional approval.
That did not help.
“Send them to me and Nathan, please,” Kishiar continued. “If you have notes on which issues are likely to become urgent first, include those as well.”
“I already marked them in the summary.”
“Good.”
Yuder’s fingers tightened once against the edge of his mouse.
Kishiar did not seem to notice. He only inclined his head, still smiling, and turned back toward Nathan with the easy assumption that the conversation had been handled.
The office resumed around him by degrees.
Someone exhaled too audibly. A chair rolled back. Kanna’s foot tapped once against the carpet and stopped. Gakane made a tiny, strangled sound that might have been relief or panic.
Yuder looked back at his screen before his eyes could settle on Kishiar’s mouth.
The email was still open, the reports still attached. The cursor blinked at the end of a line waiting for him to add Nathan’s address.
For several seconds, Yuder did not move.
Across the office, Kishiar said something else to Nathan, too soft for Yuder to make out clearly. The cadence reached him anyway, low and controlled, familiar enough to slip beneath his concentration with humiliating ease.
Distance, he suddenly understood, was not going to be enough.
Yuder entered the email address with careful precision.
This was going to be a problem.