Alexia

Alexia doesn’t bend. By the time the sun rose over the glass towers of downtown, Alexia was already awake, already dressed, already three decisions ahead of the rest of the world. She stood at the top floor of her penthouse, one hand around a cup of black coffee, the city spread beneath her like a chessboard. Streets glowed with early traffic. Buildings flashed gold under the first hit of morning light. Men in tailored suits were probably just getting out of bed, checking their phones, rehearsing lines they thought would impress somebody. Alexia had no use for that kind of noise. She was thirty-two, a billionaire, and the kind of woman people talked about in low voices even when she wasn’t in the room. Some called her cold. Some called her impossible. Some called her dangerous. None of them were fully wrong. But the truth was simpler. Alexia was real. In a world full of people who lied, stalled, flexed, pretended, begged, and folded under pressure, being real made her look almost unreal. She did not crack. She did not chase. She did not waste time on broke men with rich opinions, or smooth talkers with empty pockets, or players who treated loyalty like a joke. She had built too much, survived too much, and sharpened herself too hard to entertain nonsense.