Chapter Text
You're good at tinkering, they said.
You'd make a magnificent engineer, they said.
You could make it big — Jayce Talis big — they said.
And, well, Jinx believed them.
She went ahead and studied engineering with that same wild grin on her face that got her into trouble everywhere else in life. She poured herself into it, fueled by caffeine, spite, and the relentless need to prove she wasn’t just some crazy girl from Lanes with too many ideas and no patience. And she didn’t just make it through — she blew the damn program apart. Top of her class, valedictorian, even with a list of disciplinary notes longer than her graduation speech. Accusations of reckless experiments, unauthorized lab usage, some minor property damage (depending on who you asked)… but who cared? She was brilliant. And everyone knew it.
Her family sure did. Vi called her a little genius all the time. Sevika — who didn’t usually bother with praise — clapped her on the back and said maybe she'd actually live past thirty. Even Vander, long gone but never gone enough, would’ve been proud. The whole of the Lanes buzzed with it: Our girl made it big.
And she believed it, too.
For a while.
She landed a position straight out of school, no internships, no junior assistant crap — directly under Jayce Talis himself. The Progress Man. The golden boy of Piltover. The one who broke the ceiling for every scrappy engineer from the Undercity with nothing but a wild idea and a soldering gun.
Kiramman Enterprises.
The oldest, wealthiest, most powerful company in Piltover — hell, maybe in the whole damn continent. A company that reinvented itself every generation, always chasing the next big thing. They were bankers once, then shippers, then builders, then war suppliers, and now… Hextech. Jayce’s domain. Engineering. The future.
Jinx thought she’d be right there at the front of it all. In the heart of the revolution, throwing sparks and ideas around, changing the world.
Except, yeah.
Not exactly.
Nobody told her that “working under Jayce Talis” actually meant working under Caitlyn Kiramman, who managed half the company's board; who reported to Cassandra Kiramman, who seemed to manage everything and nothing at all. And Jayce — if he even counted as part of this chain of command — was apparently somewhere around, too busy being a visionary to ever set foot in her department.
Jinx didn’t meet him, not once. Eight months in, not even a glimpse.
What she did meet was paperwork. Mountains of it.
Endless reports on maintenance, efficiency reviews, quarterly output analyses… Systems she didn’t even know existed when she signed the damn contract. Flowcharts and chain-of-command reports and requisition forms. There was a system for logging parts inventory and another system for logging into the inventory logging system. A Kafkaesque maze of bureaucracy so dense even Viktor would have wept.
She wasn’t even in a lab.
No.
She was in a corner office on the twelfth floor of Kiramman Enterprises' flagship tower — a sleek, glass-and-steel monstrosity that scraped the sky like it was built to stab the sun itself. The office had two desks, four monitors, ergonomic chairs, and a single sad potted plant that Lux insisted on keeping alive.
Luxanna Crownguard, her office mate.
Overly friendly. Ridiculously cheerful. Obsessed with HR regulations and dreamt — genuinely dreamt — of becoming the youngest HR manager in Kiramman Enterprises history.
Jinx figured she’d make a better ad exec. The girl could convince you to drink battery acid if she smiled while saying it.nStill, Lux wasn’t terrible for a corporate drone.
And yeah, Jinx’s office life was better than most. Flexible hours, no dress code as long as you didn’t show up naked, decent pay, rooftop access, free coffee. Hell, she even had health insurance even if she quit right now. In Piltover, that was basically a superpower.
But this wasn’t what she signed up for. She didn’t study engineering to shuffle digital paperwork. She didn’t burn herself out on code and circuits to fill spreadsheets.
And the worst part? She couldn’t even get fired for slacking off.
Because Jinx, being Jinx, figured out a way to hack the company’s internal productivity system — the program that monitored and limited employee activities on the office networks. It wasn’t even that hard. The security was built like a rusted fence pretending to be a fortress. Now she could do whatever she wanted on her work terminal without a single flag popping up on anyone’s dashboard.
At first, she used the loophole for fun. Binge-watched trash shows. Played card games. Hacked into coworkers’ terminals just to rearrange their desktop icons. But even that got old fast. Scrolling through social feeds felt like staring into a black hole of recycled stupidity. Card games didn’t hit like they used to.
So Jinx did what she always did when boredom started gnawing at the edges of her brain, she started making things up.
Not machines this time, not circuits or code. Stories. Ridiculous, over-the-top, trashy lesbian love stories.
She used a fake email account she set up on her hacked system, writing little snippets during office hours when Lux wasn’t paying attention. They were funny. Sometimes filthy. Usually both. It was stupid and juvenile and definitely against company policy.
But it was better than going insane.
And speaking of people who probably should be insane…
Caitlyn Kiramman.
Jinx saw her way more often than Jayce. Which was weird. Because Caitlyn wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with their department after the onboarding phase.
But there she was.
Every so often. Walking the floors, clipboard in hand, her expression sharp enough to slice concrete. Long legs in tight dress pants that made Jinx question every bad decision she’d ever made in her life. Dark hair always pulled back, blouse crisp, collar sometimes undone — if the day had been hard enough.
They weren’t friends, they weren’t even acquaintances.
They’d talked… maybe five times? Once a week for the first month, every two weeks after that, then once a month.
By month four, it was just polite nods in hallways, brief acknowledgments in elevators. A few smiles, a stray "Good evening" when they were the last two left on a floor swallowed by artificial light and corporate silence.
Their reasons for staying late?
Different.
Jinx stayed because she wasted most of her workday screwing around on hacked systems, so she had to play catch-up on her actual tasks if she didn’t want to get a black mark on her record.
Caitlyn?
Who the hell knew.
Maybe she liked the quiet. Maybe she liked the paperwork. Maybe that was just what heirs to corporate empires did — overwork themselves into the ground to prove a point.
Jinx didn’t ask. Wasn’t her business.
She just watched sometimes, in passing. The way you watch a lightning storm rolling over the skyline — a little awed, a little wary, a little curious if it might come crashing down on your head.
And that was her life, eight months in.
Engineer of the future, paperwork jockey of the present. A face in the crowd of the biggest company in Piltover.
Until, of course… The email.
But that’s another story.
Saying Jinx’s last few weeks were hellish would have been the understatement of the year. Hellish would’ve implied something temporary, like a storm you just had to wait out, something you could survive if you clenched your teeth hard enough and held your breath. But this? This was a slow, grinding nightmare made of dull reports, constant failures, and the kind of office politics that made her want to stick a screwdriver through her own eye socket — just for a little excitement.
It started with a minor systems failure. A sensor glitch in one of the supply lines. Nothing major. The kind of thing you slapped a warning sticker on and forgot about until the next maintenance cycle. But then, two days later, another glitch. Different section, same type of sensor. Then a week passed, and a third system malfunctioned — this time with a unit that wasn’t even in the same building.
The first report landed on Jinx’s desk with a polite little note from her direct superior, Skye Young, asking her to “take a look and write up an analysis.” Standard procedure. Jinx read the first file with half a brain, already predicting the outcome. Read the second with a little more interest. By the time the third came in, she was leaning over her monitor, eyes narrowed, fingers tapping an impatient rhythm on her desk.
It wasn’t hard to figure out. The pattern stared her right in the face, clear as neon on a dark night. Faulty code in the update patches — same third-party supplier, same firmware issues, same lazy oversight. Any idiot with half a degree could have spotted it. Hell, Lux probably could have figured it out if she wasn’t busy being HR’s favorite golden girl.
So Jinx did her job. She analyzed. She cross-referenced. She color-coded her goddamn report because apparently that made things easier for the suits. She even added a little commentary — purely professional, of course — on how they might want to address the root of the problem before the entire system chain collapsed like a house of cards in a hurricane. A few suggestions here and there. A touch of her usual sharp wit. Nothing groundbreaking. Nothing that would make anyone accuse her of stepping on toes.
Except Skye cut her off.
Halfway through their review meeting, Skye raised a hand — all manicured nails and polished rings — and shut Jinx down mid-sentence.
“I appreciate the extra thought, Jinx, but you don’t need to worry your head about that,” she said, all calm professionalism layered with thinly veiled condescension. “The engineering team will handle the solution. You’re here to analyze and submit reports. That’s all.”
Jinx stared at her for a moment, an unreadable expression smoothing over her face like fresh ice on deep water.
They better find a solution, she thought, biting down hard on the inside of her cheek. If I’m stuck in this boring-ass office job while those idiots in the labs get to play with the real toys, they better figure it out before the whole damn company implodes.
She didn’t say that, of course.
She just nodded, sharp and curt, and walked out of the meeting room before she could say something she’d regret. Or wouldn’t regret. Who the hell knew.
When she stepped back into the office she shared with Lux, the girl glanced up from her screen with a bright, eager smile — the kind that said I’m a team player in flashing neon letters. Jinx met her with a smile of her own.
Well… a smile.
Her lips stretched wide, too wide, crooked at the corners like a cracked porcelain doll. She let her eyes go a little too round, unblinking, the faintest flicker of something sharp flashing just behind them.
Lux’s cheerful expression faltered, her brows pinching in a split second of awkward confusion before she looked right back down at her screen with a nervous little hum.
Satisfied, Jinx hummed under her breath and made her way to her desk, dropping into her chair like a puppet with cut strings. She cracked her knuckles, stretched her legs out under the desk, and stared blankly at her dual monitors.
Social media tabs blinked back at her — an endless scroll of nothing. Videos, photos, meaningless updates from people she didn’t know or care about. The noise of a thousand voices talking about absolutely nothing.
It didn’t even scratch the itch anymore.
She closed the tabs with a flick of her fingers. Opened them again ten minutes later. Closed them again.
There was a hollow sort of buzz at the edges of her thoughts, like static crawling across the back of her neck. She leaned forward, opened a blank Google Docs page, and stared at it. Just stared. Watching the blinking cursor like it might jump off the screen and punch her in the face.
Fifteen minutes passed.
And then her fingers moved.
At first, it was random. A sentence here, a name there, half a line of dialogue with no speaker, no purpose. But somewhere between the fourth and fifth word, it caught.
The story poured out of her like it had been sitting there for months, waiting for her to finally shut the hell up and listen.
It wasn’t about her, it wasn't about anyone she knew.
It was about a woman named Matilda — a battle-scarred matriarch of the Light City. Once a knight, now a disgraced exile, cast out by the very council she’d sworn to protect. Betrayed. Framed. Fired from her post in a storm of scandal.
And so, Matilda left the shining towers of the Light City behind and journeyed into the Dark Lands — a wasteland of ruins and shadows and creatures that whispered her name in the dark — hunting a monster named Malison. The one responsible for everything. The one who’d set her up. The one who’d ruined her life.
It wasn’t subtle.
Jinx wasn’t even sure it was original.
Half the plot sounded suspiciously like some twisted reflection of the stories she'd heard growing up in Zaun, or half-remembered bits of gossip about Jayce and Council politics, or — hell — a weird fever dream of the whole Hextech disaster.
But as she typed, the world sharpened. Matilda wasn’t some washed-up knight. She was real in a way no report or schematic had ever felt. Malison wasn’t just a villain, either. They had a face. A past. A reason.
The story sank its hooks into her before she even noticed. And by the time she leaned back in her chair, cracking her neck and flexing her fingers, she realized she’d written pages. Pages of something dark, messy, strange — and, honestly? Kind of brilliant.
She read it back, mouth curling into a slow, uncertain grin.
She liked it. She actually liked it.
And for the first time in weeks — hell, maybe months — she felt something that wasn’t boredom or frustration or the creeping sense of wasted potential.
Curiosity.
Curiosity about what else was waiting in her head if she just reached a little deeper.
She leaned forward, breathing out slowly through her nose, staring at the half-finished document on the glowing screen.
Maybe she should save it.
Maybe she should send it somewhere. Keep it. Look at it later when the workday ground her down again.
And not on this fake work email account. No — this deserved better.
She opened a new tab, searched for her personal email — the one that wasn’t tied to Kiramman’s suffocating digital leash — and clicked open a draft message to that account.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
She’d send it to herself.
Just to keep it safe.
That was all.
Just a backup.
Her eyes flicked between the open document and the draft window.
She didn’t know it yet.
But this was the exact moment everything started to change.
—
Caitlyn Kiramman was boiling.
And not just metaphorically — though that was certainly happening too — but literally, physically, viscerally boiling beneath the navy-blue pantsuit clinging to her skin like punishment. The meeting room was a cathedral of glass and steel perched on the 18th floor of Kiramman Enterprises Tower, designed for aesthetics, not comfort. Sunlight streamed through the south-facing panels, filtered just enough to blind her left eye and sweat out her spine, while the air conditioner hummed uselessly above her, doing absolutely nothing to cool the storm of heat prickling along her collar.
She adjusted the cuffs of her blazer, the motion smooth but tense, a gesture made hundreds of times before, but now somehow sharper — more precise. A habitual attempt at self-control. If she didn’t keep herself grounded in the small, practiced motions — straightening a sleeve, aligning her notepad, re-centering the name placard in front of her — she was liable to leap across the table and throttle Marcus with her bare hands.
Because Marcus, the living embodiment of nepotism in a badly tailored suit, was talking. Again.
“—and so, what I’m proposing,” he drawled, gesturing with the confidence of a man who had never been told no in his life, “is that we implement a mandatory bi-weekly culture reset. A sort of... full-departmental refresh. A day where teams switch roles entirely for 24 hours. Engineers become marketing, logistics does finance, HR runs R&D—think of the synergy. Think of the bonding. It would build empathy, Caitlyn.”
Caitlyn blinked. Slowly. Deliberately.
The kind of blink people often attributed to apex predators.
“You’re suggesting,” she said, her voice dangerously neutral, “that we remove qualified engineers from their posts to run marketing campaigns they are not trained for. And vice versa.”
“Yes,” Marcus nodded enthusiastically, not catching the undertone at all. “Just for a day, of course. A quarterly holiday, essentially. It would be invigorating.”
Caitlyn leaned back, just slightly. The leather of her chair creaked beneath her, the sound like distant thunder.
“And if, during this quarterly ‘refresh,’ a junior analyst in Logistics is suddenly responsible for Hextech diagnostics and an entire facility goes dark because someone mistook a thermoregulator for a fusion anchor…? What then?”
Marcus’s smile flickered for half a second — barely noticeable — then returned in full corporate force. “Well, that’s a worst-case scenario, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Caitlyn echoed, deadpan.
Salo, seated two chairs to Marcus’s left — barrel-chested, red-faced, full of himself in all the wrong ways — leaned forward, folding his thick arms across the table with all the subtlety of a battering ram.
“I don’t see the problem, Miss Kiramman. I like the idea. It pushes people out of their comfort zones. We coddle the departments too much. Engineers think they're better than everyone else just because they sit closest to the labs.”
Caitlyn’s jaw twitched. Just a fraction. “Engineers sit closest to the labs because their jobs require access to volatile energy sources and precise tools, Mr. Salo. Not because we favor them.”
Salo scoffed. “Favor or not, your tone’s saying everything. You’re dismissing Marcus without even trying to consider it. This is why people say you think you're above the rest of us.”
That did it.
There was a beat — the kind of silence you feel in your teeth.
Then Caitlyn stood.
Not quickly. Not explosively. She rose with cold, controlled deliberation, like a glacier shifting after centuries of stillness. Her palms slapped down on the smooth surface of the table, not loudly, but with a suddenness that made every spine in the room straighten like they were sitting before a firing squad.
Her gaze swept the room like a blade.
“Let me be very clear,” she said, her voice quiet — too quiet — the kind of tone that froze blood faster than any scream. Her accent, clipped and aristocratic, dropped all softness and melted into steel.
“I am the highest of all your departments. I oversee engineering, logistics, development, strategy, and defense contracts. Every division. Every floor. Every room in this tower answers to me. I don’t just sit at this table. I built it. My name is carved into the very foundation of this company. I am the matriarch of House Kiramman — and if you forget that again, Salo, I will make sure the only thing you're overseeing is the parking garage’s lighting schedule.”
Her eyes locked onto his. Cold. Empty. A tundra in a gaze.
“Address me with respect,” she continued, standing tall, voice smooth as ice on polished marble, “or keep your mouth shut.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
A single audible gulp broke it — someone, maybe Enzo from Development, who looked one heartbeat away from evacuating his soul through his tie. Another voice, small and stammering, offered a faint apology. Salo, to his credit, managed not to flinch… but he didn’t meet her eyes again. Marcus stared at his shoes like they held the answers to the universe.
Caitlyn exhaled slowly, her chest rising and falling beneath her blazer in practiced rhythm, the only sign she was regaining composure. She didn’t need to shout. Didn’t need to raise her voice or flip tables. Her fury came in cold waves — the kind that froze you solid before you realized you were drowning.
And then—
Ping.
Her phone, sitting screen-up beside her notepad, lit up. One new email.
From: [email protected]
Subject: (no subject)
It might as well have been a bomb.
Her spine straightened a millimeter more, her mask cracked. Just a hairline fracture — a flicker of disbelief in her eyes, a ghost of a reaction that didn’t belong in boardrooms.
She blinked, clicked the screen off without opening the message, and slipped the phone into the inner pocket of her blazer with a fluid, practiced motion.
“This meeting is dismissed until one of you grows a functional brain cell and acts like it.” she said, and turned on her heel without waiting for acknowledgement.
The heavy glass doors of the meeting room swung open with a dignified hiss as she strode through them like a storm bottled in six feet of razor-sharp precision.
Her heels echoed down the hallway like a war drum.
The matriarch had left the room.
And nothing good ever followed the storm.
She stormed through the hallways of the executive floor with the relentless, clipped pace of someone walking a knife’s edge between seething rage and cold, surgical control. Her heels struck the marble tiles in rapid, echoing clicks — sharp, staccato notes that bounced off the polished glass walls and sent junior employees scurrying back into offices and around corners. The sun filtering through the high windows glinted off her dark, perfectly styled hair, and off the hard set of her jaw that screamed do not cross me without a word.
Her watch glinted when she checked it — a smooth, seamless motion as natural as breathing — though she barely registered the numbers ticking past. The meeting had gone over by fifty minutes, fifty minutes of her life she’d never get back, and it had cost her more than just time. She could feel her composure unraveling at the seams, heat rolling under her skin in waves that had nothing to do with the office temperature.
Her mind was a riot, a full-scale mutiny of frustration and simmering fury.
She hated this position.
She hated this company.
She hated the board meetings, the sycophants, the polished liars in overpriced suits and their half-baked ideas wrapped in corporate jargon like gilded manure.
She hated the legacy that hung around her neck like a chain — Kiramman Enterprises, House Kiramman, the bright shining future everyone expected her to protect. She hated the weight of it, the way it pressed into her skin and her bones and every breath she took.
She hated how no one — no one — ever took her seriously unless she carved her authority into their skulls like ice.
She hated the pantsuits that strangled her every movement, the ridiculous heels that felt like shackles, the too-tight bra digging into her ribs.
She hated the way she couldn’t so much as blink without feeling like half the city was watching, waiting for her to crack, to slip, to prove that she wasn’t half the woman her mother was.
And gods help her, she just wanted to go home.
To run herself a bath, sink into it until her skin pruned and the world faded out.
Drink herself blind on champagne she didn’t even like.
Drown the weight on her shoulders.
If she was lucky… drown herself too.
The elevator doors slid open with a soft chime, breaking her spiral of murderous thoughts, and she stepped inside with the grace of a blade sliding into its sheath. She hit the button for the executive offices and folded her arms, posture a picture of controlled fury.
Luxanna Crownguard was already in the elevator.
Poor girl.
The assistant under Mel Medarda’s direct mentorship — an internship most would kill for — stood rigid as a board in her perfectly ironed skirt suit, clutching her tablet to her chest like a shield against a firing squad. She looked up at Caitlyn, eyes wide, and offered a polite, shaky nod.
Caitlyn didn’t even blink, didn’t acknowledge her at all.
They rode in silence. The kind of silence that prickled at the skin, that suffocated. Lux glanced sideways once, hesitantly, like a rabbit scenting a predator, then fixed her eyes on the floor numbers ticking upward.
Caitlyn’s mind raced far ahead of the elevator’s slow climb — a whirl of angry thoughts layered with colder, crueler calculations. Her hands tightened around her elbows.
What a joke this company was.
What a joke this whole charade was.
The elevator chimed for the executive floor.
Caitlyn stepped forward — all sharp lines and silent purpose — but halfway through the motion, something pricked at her. A whisper of conscience. A flicker of habit.
She realized she hadn’t acknowledged the girl beside her at all.
She paused, mid-step, and turned slightly, glancing over her shoulder with a polite smile.
At least, it was supposed to be a polite smile.
Her lips pulled back just a little too tightly, her blue eyes a little too sharp, her expression stretched into something that landed somewhere between “social courtesy” and “horror movie antagonist about to harvest your organs.”
Lux blinked at her.
And blinked again.
The expression was… familiar. Too familiar.
Because a few hours ago, Lux had seen almost the exact same unsettling grin on Jinx’s face — that wide, crooked, empty-eyed thing Jinx called a smile whenever she was feeling especially chaotic.
And now Caitlyn — her superior, her boss, the poised ice queen of the Kiramman legacy — was giving her the same damn look.
For a heartbeat, Lux’s brain short-circuited.
Her eyes went comically wide, her lips parting in silent horror.
Then, snapping back to reality, Lux scrambled to paste on a too-bright smile of her own, gave a small, awkward wave that might have passed as friendly in a different universe, and stepped back as if trying to melt into the elevator wall.
Caitlyn’s faint attempt at softness faltered, a small, awkward pout curling at the corner of her mouth.
Of course. Even that, she couldn’t get right.
With a slow, terse nod, Caitlyn turned and strode out of the elevator.
Lux let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding as the doors slid shut behind her.
Caitlyn’s heels clicked against the marble as she walked the long hall toward her office, posture tall, composed, betraying none of the dark cloud that swirled behind her ribs. She passed by glass-walled offices, rows of desks, hushed conversations cut short at her approach. She kept her chin high, face a mask of perfect, impassive calm.
But then—
A sharp, unhinged bark of laughter cut through the hum of the executive floor like a knife.
It echoed — sharp, loud, just this side of manic.
Caitlyn stopped dead in her tracks.
The air in the corridor shifted.
Every head within earshot snapped up, every employee freezing mid-motion, mid-breath, eyes darting toward the sound like deer catching the scent of a predator. The infamous Kiramman Lightning was about to strike, and no one wanted to be caught in the blast radius.
Even the walls seemed to hold their breath.
A beat passed.
And then — a soft click.
The door to one of the corner offices opened slowly, and a familiar head of messy, ocean-blue hair poked out into the hallway.
Jinx.
Her eyes locked onto Caitlyn’s in an instant, widening like a deer caught in headlights.
You could almost see the realization dawn on her face — that rare, fleeting moment when even Jinx knew she’d just monumentally screwed up.
She pushed the door open a little further, leaning lazily — or trying to — against the doorframe, a half-cocked grin stretching over her lips.
“Heyyyyy, boss,” she drawled, the word forced a little too much, like she thought she could charm her way out of a death sentence.
Caitlyn closed her eyes. A deep, slow inhale.
This company is a joke, she thought.
A joke. And it’s not even funny.
When she opened her eyes again, Jinx was still there, leaning in that ridiculous way, her grin stretched wide enough to almost — almost — be endearing if Caitlyn weren’t still imagining throttling half the board.
But something in that crooked little smirk, in the absurdity of it, made her pause.
Like it always did.
No matter how much this company tested her limits, no matter how bad the meetings or how infuriating the board, there was something about Jinx that threw a wrench straight into Caitlyn’s carefully constructed world.
It wasn’t her attitude — though that was bad enough — or even her irreverent disregard for corporate norms.
It was just… her.
Something too alive.
Too chaotic.
Too much.
Something Caitlyn couldn’t quite bring herself to hate.
She exhaled.
“Well,” Caitlyn said, voice cool as frost, sharp enough to cut glass. “I’m thrilled you’re enjoying your job enough to bark out laughter in the middle of a professional environment. But I’d prefer if the only noise on this floor came from work. Or, at the very least, white noise.”
Jinx’s eyes flicked wide for a heartbeat — she had expected worse, clearly — then she nodded, fast, too fast.
“Oh, of course! I adore my job,” Jinx chirped, a mockingly sweet lilt to her voice. “Hard not to laugh with all the joy this place brings me, you know?”
Caitlyn shot her a look.
A sharp, narrowed, don’t push your luck look.
Jinx clamped her mouth shut immediately and nodded again, this time with exaggerated solemnity.
Satisfied — or at least too drained to care — Caitlyn gave a small, almost imperceptible shake of her head and turned back toward her office.
No words. No warnings.
Just the cold, clipped sound of her heels clicking away.
The hallway seemed to exhale with her departure.
Jinx, along with half the floor, let out the breath they didn’t know they’d been holding.
Caitlyn’s heels echoed sharply in the hushed corridor as she approached her office door, each step purposeful and clipped — a metronome of restrained fury. The storm still brewed low in her chest, pressing into her ribcage like a vice, smoldering beneath the thin layer of professional composure she’d managed to paste back onto her face after her encounter with Jinx.
Maddie, her assistant, appeared at her side just a few meters from her door, clutching a digital tablet against her tailored navy vest. The young woman’s steps were light but brisk, practiced in the art of keeping pace with a woman like Caitlyn without making it obvious she was half-jogging to do so. Her sleek ponytail bounced with every motion, her words tumbling out in a careful, even cadence.
“Miss Kiramman, you have the quarterly review with the Piltover Infrastructure Council at five, followed by the procurement strategy session at six, and the dinner appointment with Councillor Medarda at seven—”
“Cancel all of it,” Caitlyn cut in smoothly, not even sparing a glance as her hand closed around the door handle.
Maddie blinked, lips parting on reflex to ask why, but caught herself just in time. She gave a curt nod, professional to the last second, and turned on her heel without another word — a silent acknowledgment of the chain of command.
Caitlyn opened her office door and stepped inside, shutting it firmly behind her with a muted but definitive click.
The moment the latch caught, she exhaled — a slow, weighted breath that seemed to drain every ounce of energy from her muscles. With one hand, she reached for the top button of her shirt, unfastening it with a sharp flick of her fingers. The other hand tugged the blazer off her shoulders in a practiced motion, letting the structured fabric slide free and land haphazardly over the back of her office chair.
Her pristine image cracked further when she bypassed the imposing oak desk altogether and made a beeline for the leather couch lining the far wall. She dropped onto it with the grace of a woman who didn’t care who saw her collapse.
The soft creak of leather greeted her as she flopped back, limbs sprawling in undignified exhaustion. The heels came off next — kicked aside with a sharp, unceremonious motion — and she reached down to rub at the aching balls of her feet, fingers pressing into sore skin with quiet, hissing relief.
Her head tipped back over the couch’s edge, her gaze landing on the high ceiling with its elaborate crown molding and cold white glow of overhead lights.
For a moment, she sat there, letting herself sink into the silence of the room. Her legs sprawled, arms draped lazily along the armrests, the perfect image of a woman who’d reached her limit.
If anyone walked in now — which they wouldn’t, unless they wanted to lose their job — they wouldn’t see Caitlyn Kiramman, future CEO of Piltover’s oldest and most powerful conglomerate. They’d see a woman moments away from throwing herself out of the nearest executive window.
But like all masks she wore, she slid back into it effortlessly.
With a single breath — in, out — she straightened her posture, pulling her limbs inward like a cat stretching out of a lazy sprawl. Her feet slid back into her heels with a faint wince, her shoulders rolled back, and within the blink of an eye, the ice queen was back on her throne.
She crossed the room, smoothed her cuffs, and sat behind her desk with the same crisp, precise grace expected of a Kiramman. Her laptop greeted her with the soft hum of power as she flipped it open, the screen casting a muted glow against the shadows of her office.
A dozen unread emails blinked back at her. Half from internal departments, a few forwarded from her mother’s office, several more marked with varying degrees of urgent — none of which sparked the faintest flicker of interest. She scanned them with a mechanical efficiency until one in particular caught her eye.
From: [email protected]
Subject: (no subject)
Caitlyn exhaled through her nose, rolling her eyes upward at the absurdity of the handle. She clicked it open with the resigned expectation of spam — or worse, some idiotic prank sent by one of the interns hoping to make a name for themselves by poking the Kiramman heir.
No text.
Just an attachment.
A Google Docs file.
Curiosity twitched faintly in her chest. She double-clicked.
The document loaded in a heartbeat.
LAW BOMB — Chapter One
Caitlyn’s eyes narrowed. Her gaze flicked over the first lines, her lips pressing into a thin line.
It wasn’t a report.
It wasn’t a proposal.
It wasn’t anything she’d ever expected.
It was… a story.
She scrolled down, skimming at first — and then, despite herself, she started reading.
It started with Matilda.
A once-honored enforcer of the Light City, the pillar of its gilded enforce, now nothing more than a disgraced shadow stalking the underworld’s edges. Cast out after a botched mission, her badge stripped away, her name blackened by whispers of corruption and betrayal.
Beneath the weight of scandal and shattered legacy, Matilda walked the dark alleys of the city’s underbelly — the lawless, the broken, the rotted sectors the shining towers never deigned to see.
And there, in the heart of that rot, was Malison.
A phantom.
A ghost in the smoke.
The criminal mastermind who danced on the edges of the city’s nightmares, trafficking in hex, drugs, chaos — a terrorist in the purest form.
Their paths crossed first in blood. A failed raid, a near-fatal standoff, and the twisted, undeniable thread of fascination that laced through every bullet exchanged, every glare locked in the dark.
Matilda hunted Malison.
Malison hunted Matilda.
They circled each other like vultures — enemies, rivals, something darker, something that slipped beneath the skin and curled, hot and venomous, in the chest.
Fists and knives, whispered threats in alleys, smoke and shadows and half-truths.
A war of words.
A war of want.
A bond as toxic as it was electric — every confrontation charged with something neither dared to name.
Because behind every clash, every deadly exchange, there was always the same question.
Was Matilda chasing Malison out of duty?
Or because she couldn’t bear to let her slip away?
Was Malison taunting Matilda because she hated her?
Or because, in some twisted, unspoken way… she needed her?
The story unfolded in raw, sharp prose, unflinching and visceral — scenes of tense meetings on rooftops, hands pressed to throats, gun barrels pressed to ribs, breathless silences hovering on the edge of something far more dangerous than violence.
A story of a woman falling for the very thing she was supposed to destroy.
Caitlyn blinked.
Twenty-seven minutes.
She checked the clock at the corner of her screen, her mouth half open in disbelief.
She had spent twenty-seven entire minutes reading a piece of…
Was this supposed to be… yuri?
A toxic yuri about an ex-enforcer and a drug-running terrorist locked in some bizarre spiral of obsession and mutual destruction.
She leaned back in her chair, one hand raising slowly to pinch the bridge of her nose as if the gesture could somehow force sense back into her day.
And the worst part — the most absurd, ridiculous, damning part — was that she liked it.
Why?
Why had she liked it?
Why did this absurd, over-the-top, dark little story do more to untangle the tension in her spine than half a bottle of vintage wine or a full day at the shooting range?
She didn’t even know who the hell sent it.
A sharp, breathless sound of disbelief broke from her throat — half a laugh, half a curse — as she slammed the laptop closed with a little too much force, the device giving a soft, startled snap beneath her hands.
“Unbelievable,” she muttered under her breath, standing up so fast the chair rolled back a few inches. She reached for her blazer, muttering again, softer this time, almost to herself.
“My life is a big, fat joke.”
She stormed out of the office like a shadow slicing through light.