The Evaluator
She's spent sixteen years reading every room she walks into. Now someone is finally reading her.
Ruby Byrne has built a career on reading rooms. She closes every deal, says all the right things, and has stopped expecting to feel anything when she does.
She finds the card on her desk on a Tuesday: cream stock, no envelope. On the back, The Apex Institute and one line: you have been selected for preliminary evaluation.
The Institute already knows Ruby is good at her job; sixteen years of success have answered that. What it wants to know is whether her judgment and character hold under real pressure - before deciding whether she's worth admitting to a network that could be her way out of a career that stopped meaning anything to her a long time ago.
Julian Ozan runs her sessions. In the first hour he tells her that her competence was never in doubt, then keeps asking questions she hasn't rehearsed answers for. By week three she's stopped tracking whether she's passing. What she wants from him is personal, inconvenient, and has nothing to do with the evaluation - but she can no longer pretend wanting him and being under his scrutiny are two separate things.
The Evaluator is Book 1 of The Apex Institute - a series about secret networks, high-stakes scrutiny, and the people who come undone inside them. A slow-burn novel of forbidden attraction and shifting power, for readers who like their tension psychological, their prose literary, and their endings unconventional. Ruby's story continues in Office Hours.
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