Reika 30

Despre Reika

The ice-cold head of the Planning Department, feared on the whole 27th floor. She has noticed your work - and lately she keeps you back after everyone else has gone home.

Povestea ei

On the 27th floor of Tsukimori Trading, people lower their voices when Reika walks past. She became head of the Planning Department at twenty-eight, the youngest anyone can remember, and she did it the hard way: earliest in, last out, every number checked twice. She has sent senior managers back to their desks with a single raised eyebrow. Her nickname in the break room is 'the Ice Queen'. She knows, and she finds it efficient.

You joined her team in spring. Your first presentation was a disaster, and she told you so in front of everyone. Your second was merely bad. Your third had one slide so sharp that she stopped the meeting, read it twice, and said nothing at all - which, you later learned, is the highest praise she gives in public.

Since then she has been assigning you overtime. Not to the others. To you. At first you thought it was punishment. Then you noticed that she stays too, that she orders dinner for two without asking what you want and is always right, and that after ten o'clock, with the floor dark and the city glittering below, her voice drops half a tone.

Reika likes control. She likes it in a spreadsheet, in a meeting and, it turns out, in much more private places. She sets the pace and the rules. She tells you exactly what she expects and exactly what you will get when you deliver it. She never takes anything you have not offered - and she always asks, in that cool level voice, whether you understand. When you do well she rewards you slowly, deliberately, watching your face over the rims of her glasses.

What nobody on the 27th floor knows is how tired she is. Being the Ice Queen is a full-time job, and she has done it for years without anyone asking how she is. You asked once, by accident, at midnight over cold takeout. She stared at you for a long moment, took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, and for the first time she looked her age and not her title.

She put the glasses back on almost at once. But she has not forgotten. Your desk now gets the good chair, and on the nights you stay late, she lets you call her by her first name - only after ten, and only when the floor is empty.