The ruthless billionaire CEO fell for his new staff
You’re staring.
I’m not.
You were.
I just started today.
I don’t even know who you are.
Gozy, right?
I never told you my name.
See you later.
You’re cute, by the way.
Okay?
Bye, dark chocolate.
Gozy had told himself to be invisible.
New job, new rules, keep your head down.
That was the plan.
At 28, he had learned the hard way that standing out never ended well for someone like him.
So, he pressed his shirt twice that morning, polished his shoes, and walked into the glass tower of Weagle Akonkwos empire with nothing but hunger and quiet ambition.
He did not expect the elevator.
He stepped in on the ground floor, arms full of files from HR, head bent over his phone.
The doors were closing when a hand shot through and stopped them.
The man who walked in filled the space immediately, not just physically, but with something electric, something that pressed against the walls and made the air feel thinner.
Gozy looked up.
He was tall, dark-skinned, sharp-jawed, the kind of handsome that looked almost aggressive.
A fitted black shirt, no tie, collar open just enough to hint at the ink that crawled up his neck.
His watch cost more than Gozy’s rent for the year.
His eyes, when they landed on Gozy, were dark and unreadable.
“You’re new,” the man said.
Not a question.
“Yes, sir.”
“Started today.
Marketing department.”
The man looked at him for a moment too long.
Something passed through his expression and disappeared before Gozy could name it.
“Don’t call me, sir,” he said.
“It’s Regal.”
Gozy blinked.
“You’re the CEO.”
“That’s correct.”
The elevator opened on the top floor.
Regal stepped out without another word, but at the last second, he turned and looked back, just briefly, just enough.
Gozy stood there as the doors closed again, heart knocking stupidly against his ribs.
He had told himself to be invisible.
Regal Okonkwo had looked at him like he was the only thing in the room.
This, Gozie thought, pressing his back against the elevator wall, was already a problem.
Everyone in the office had a Regal story.
He fired a department head on a Tuesday for missing a deadline by 4 hours.
He once rejected an entire campaign 3 days before launch because one font felt lazy.
He did not do small talk, did not do pleasantries, and according to the whispers in the break room, he did not do relationships.
“Playboy,” Gozie’s new colleague Ife said, handing him a coffee.
“Beautiful women, expensive hotels, gone by morning.
He doesn’t do commitment.
Never has.”
Gozie nodded and said nothing.
He did not mention the elevator.
He did not mention the way Regal had said his name, which he hadn’t even given him, meaning Regal had looked him up already, which meant something, which meant nothing, which meant Gozie needed to stop.
He lasted until Thursday.
Regal appeared at his desk at 6:00 p.m. when the floor had emptied, sleeves rolled up, tattoos running down both forearms, a serpent on the left, something that looked like scripture on the right.
He stood over Gozie’s desk and looked at the campaign board Gozie had pinned up without being asked.
“You restructured the Q3 rollout,” Regal said.
“The original had a gap in the second week push.
I closed it.”
Regal was quiet for a long moment.
He pulled out the chair across from Gozie and sat down, which nobody apparently ever did with the CEO.
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, eyes moving over the board with the focus of someone who respected good work and hated pretending otherwise.
“What would you do with the Lagos launch specifically?”
They talked for 40 minutes.
Just work.
Clean and sharp and focused.
But twice, Regal’s knee brushed his under the desk and neither of them moved away.
When Regal finally stood to leave, he paused at the edge of the cubicle.
“You’re wasted in the general pool,” he said quietly.
“I’ll have you moved to my floor by Monday.”
Gozi watched him walk away and understood, with complete clarity, that he was in serious trouble.
The 12th floor was different, quieter, colder.
Everything was glass and dark wood and the kind of silence that came with power.
Gozi’s new desk was 15 ft from Regal’s office door, which meant he heard everything.
The sharp calls, the meetings that ended in 30 seconds when they should have taken an hour, the rare low laugh that Regal gave when something actually surprised him.
Gozi learned his rhythms like weather.
Coffee at 7:00, black.
Lunch skipped most days unless someone forced it.
He left the building at 9:00 or 10:00, always alone, jacket over one shoulder.
The tattoos disappeared under his sleeves by morning and reappeared by afternoon when he inevitably rolled them back.
There was one on his left hand, the only one always visible, a small compass rose between his thumb and index finger.
Gozi stared at it more than he should have.
On Wednesday of his second week upstairs, Regal leaned out of his office and said simply, “Lunch.”
Not an invitation.
An instruction.
They went to a restaurant Gozi had never been to, the kind with no menu on the wall and waiters who already knew what you wanted.
Regal talked about the Legos expansion with total focus and Gozi matched him point for point.
And at some moment between the main course and whatever came after it, the conversation slipped, barely noticeably, from work to something else.
“Where did you study?”
Regal asked.
“UniLag.”
“Scholarship.”
Regal nodded.
No pity, no performance.
Just filing it away.
You’re sharper than half the people I pay three times your salary.
“I know.”
Gozie said.
Weigel looked at him.
Then he smiled.
It was small and quick, but it broke across his face like something he hadn’t planned, and Gozie felt it in his chest like a pulled thread.
“You’re not invisible, you know.”
Weigel said quietly.
Gozie looked at his plate.
“I used to try to be.”
“Don’t.”
Weigel said simply.
Just that.
Don’t.
Gozie looked up and Weigel was still watching him with those dark, unreadable eyes, and the air between them was doing something it had no business doing in a restaurant at noon.
It started with a text at 11:47 p.m. on a Friday.
There’s a place in six.
No cameras at the door.
Come if you want.
Gozie stared at it for five full minutes.
Then he got dressed.
The club was underground, literally, down a narrow staircase behind an unmarked door.
Music that felt like a second heartbeat.
Low blue light and bodies and the kind of anonymity that expensive places sometimes offered to people who needed it.
Weigel was already there at a private table in the back, jacket gone, shirt open at the collar, a drink in his hand.
Without the office around him, he looked younger and more dangerous at the same time.
The tattoos on his neck caught the light.
He watched Gozie cross the room toward him with an expression that made Gozie’s steps slow down even as he kept walking.
“You came.”
Weigel said.
“You texted.”
Weigel handed him a drink without asking what he wanted.
It was exactly what he would have ordered.
They didn’t talk about work.
For the first time, they didn’t talk about work.
They talked about music and Lagos traffic and a book Weigel had apparently read three times and a neighborhood Gozie had grown up in that Weigel knew only from driving through.
They were sitting close, the noise requiring it, and at some point Regal’s hand found the back of Gozie’s chair and didn’t move.
At 1:00 a.m. Regal leaned in to say something and his mouth was close enough to Gozie’s ear that Gozie stopped hearing the words.
“This is a bad idea.”
Gozie said, not pulling back.
“Yes.”
Regal agreed, not pulling back either.
They sat like that for a suspended, ridiculous moment.
Then Regal pulled back slowly, finished his drink, and stood up.
“I’ll get the car.”
In the backseat going home, their hands rested an inch apart on the seat between them.
Neither of them closed the distance.
Neither of them moved away.
The inch felt enormous.
The inch felt like nothing.
It happened on a Tuesday, which felt wrong for something that changed everything.
They were working late, alone on the 12th floor, the city blinking below them through the floor-to-ceiling glass.
Gozie had his jacket off, tie loosened, marker in hand, drawing lines across a whiteboard.
Regal was behind him, leaning against the conference table, arms crossed, watching.
“Move the Lagos anchor two weeks earlier.”
Regal said.
“If we do that, we lose the Port Harcourt window.”
“We lose it anyway if we don’t.”
“Not if we run them parallel with a split team.”
Silence.
Then Regal said, “Show me.”
Gozie turned to explain and Regal had crossed the room without him noticing and was standing directly behind him, looking at the board over his shoulder.
Close enough that Gozie could feel the warmth of him.
Neither of them looked at the board.
“Gozie.”
Regal’s voice was lower than it had any right to be.
Gozie turned around slowly.
They were close.
Regal’s eyes dropped to his mouth and came back up, no apology in it, just honesty, the same honesty that made him terrifying in a boardroom.
“This is complicated.”
Gozie said.
“I know.
You’re my boss.
I know you don’t do relationships.”
Something shifted in Regal’s face.
“I haven’t wanted to before.”
The before did it.
The quiet weight of that single word.
Gozie closed the remaining distance and Regal met him halfway and then it was just that, just them, just a kiss that started careful and became something else entirely.
Regal’s hand coming up to the side of Gozie’s face like he was something worth being careful with.
When they finally separated, Gozie pressed his forehead against Regal’s and tried to remember how to breathe.
“Nobody can know,” Regal said quietly.
“I know.”
It should have been a red flag.
Later, Gozie would remember thinking that.
Instead, he just nodded and let Regal kiss him again, softer this time, and let himself believe that secret and temporary were two different things.
