Page 32 of A Fae in Finance
“Well… I’m a woman in the workplace.” I frowned at her.
“This is… poor reasoning.”
“I—” It was poor reasoning, yes. “I cannot defend the logic, fair one.”
“You evade as surely as one of my own subjects,” the Princeling said. “And I have ignored my subjects for long enough.” He made to push back from the table.
I felt like the deflated remnants of a Halloween pumpkin watching Thanksgiving guests walk into a house. And he’d given me nopracticalinformation—how would this teaching thing even work? Would I get a classroom? Were we putting flyers up?
Was I getting paid?
“Please, my lord, I have questions about how this all works—like, do I pay rent for my room? What about the food?”
All three of them stared at me.
“You wish to barter for what is given freely?” the Princeling asked.
The Crone chuckled.
“Uh, no?” I said, blinking away a fresh flush of tears.
“Good. Barter wisely, Lady of the True Dreams.” This time, he pushed away from the table and stood up.
“Why do you call me that?”
The Crone chuckled again. The sound felt like a nerve pinching in my neck. The Princeling held out an arm for her and lifted her to her feet.
He inclined his head toward me and led the other two away.
In my room, I curled up on the floor to cry again. I imagined my Tinder profile in a few years:Thirty, flirty, and trapped in a pocket dimension.Doctor Kitten sat on the bed, looking down at me with his implacable green eyes. Doctor Kitten was used to my bouts of crying and seemed relieved not to be conscripted as a tissue.
I stayed that way for a long time, but I was a bit more alert than the night before and eventually the floor felt too hard beneath the padding from the blankets. Taking some calming breaths, I tried to reanalyze my situation with cold logic.
I was here in Faerie for ten years.
I had made a bargain with a Prince of Faerie.
If I completed my “mission” to teach faeries about humans, I’d get some kind of reward in the form of magical resources.
And, most importantly, this meant that I’d be in the same role for the next decade. Working with a likely rotating cast of young investment dudes. UnderJeff.
Not a great situation. But I’d panic later.
Standing up and shaking my limbs to get some blood flowing, I logged back into my computer. There were forty-three new emails waiting for me in my inbox.
The first read:Send the most recent version of the presentation.
My heart stuttered in my chest. 1:33, three minutes after I had closed the computer. I looked at my phone screen. 2:18. I’d been gone forty-five minutes. I went to the top of the chain and read the most recent message.
Miri, this is not a complicated request. It doesn’t look good when you take too long to do simple things.
I tabbed over to the shared file drive and dragged the file into a response box. Then, for good measure, I attached the email I’d sent to him with the deck—had it only been two nights before?
Attached, and for reference it is in the cloud as well!I typed. Maybe the exclamation mark would make it friendlier.
I sent before I could think too hard about it.
I needed my to-do list.
