[NIKITA]

"Sir, you have a meeting with the board in an hour," Qiao\'s secretary said to him, and he just nodded. He didn\'t need to ask for the direction of the boardroom because he knew this place like he owned it.

"Thank you."

"Are these the latest reports on the factory?" Carrie asked.

"Yes, ma\'am. The factory workers have been complaining for a while now, but no one had really paid attention to them," the woman said before she gasped when she realized that she had just revealed too much.

Then again, if there was any hope for the workers, then it was in the form of two soldiers who had sworn to serve the country. Surely they wouldn\'t be going against their oaths now, would they?

"What\'s your name?" Carrie asked, with a smile on her face. It wasn\'t forced like the ones she wore in public, and this was a genuine smile, one that only Qiao, Nikita, and her squadron always saw. She missed those soldiers, but what could she do now?

She had already made a commitment, and she was going to see it through.

"Zara, ma\'am," the secretary said.

"Okay, Zara, I appreciate your honesty. Prepare the factory files. I need to know when the chaos began and what happened. Also, I need the production reports on the Pavlenko coffee.

"If we are going to work this shit out, then we need to have all the data, don\'t you think?" Carrie asked, making Zara relax. Well, at least she wasn\'t in trouble today. That, however, was a close call, really.

It was almost like she had made it her job to speak out for the factory workers. Coffee processing was complicated, and that much Carrie had known, considering she was the daughter of a once factory worker.

She knew how hard those people worked to bring their food to the table. She knew the strains that everyone went through there. There were times when the daily wages wouldn\'t even be enough for them to survive.

Expectedly, she had decided to bury her past when her parents died years ago, long before she even had the dream of joining the Russian army, but today, she had the chance to save people.

Sure, her parents didn\'t work at the Pavlenko coffee production plant, but that didn\'t mean she didn\'t know what went on behind those closed doors.

She would try to make things better for them without jeopardizing the business. After all, the company would just be an idea without the employees.

"Thank you, ma\'am," Zara said, and Carrie thought it was a bit awkward. Sure, she had to remind herself that he was in the corporate world now, but for a woman who had spent ten years being referred to as the commander, this was all new for her.

Maybe she would get used to it, but did she really want to get used to being called ma\'am? That was a straight title for plain women, and Ekarolina Tabakov was not a plain woman.

She was different, a woman who knew what she wanted and how to get it. A one-woman army who could walk through the fires of hell and make it back home to her loved ones.

She wasn\'t scared of anything. After all, she didn\'t become a commander by being a sweetheart to every Tom, Dick, and Harry.

"Carrie, I think we can do this. It\'s not as hard, and we can just think of it as one of the wars we were sent to, y\'know. And then once this is done, we get to go back home," Qiao said hopefully.

He was slowly embracing the fact that he would be seated in an office and behind computers for longer than he would be in the field in the next six months.

"That\'s the spirit soldier, now let\'s get to work," Carrie said before they began indulging themselves in the paperwork. There was a lot, but everything would be okay with the emails they had received.

Together, the best friends worked the hour out, occasionally making jokes about how Nikita had undoubtedly made the right decision in staying away from the desk jobs. They were terrible and all that, but then they knew they wouldn\'t have to keep at work for the whole day.

Hell, they didn\'t even have to be at work to be working, which was an additional advantage that came with their jobs.

Zara had already gone back to work, but she was clearly scared of Andrew, the human mountain that spoke very few words. On the other hand, the man in question was paying attention to everything Qiao and Carrie were talking about.

Andrew needed the information because it would help him too. All of this wasn\'t something he had imagined, but here he was, using a phone, bȧrėly twelve hours after he almost smashed Rohit\'s face in the desk.

The human had understood their tempers and was doing a good job being himself. He was a social person, making him even more of a darling to Ken and Enrique, but Andrew still kept his guard high.

He wasn\'t going to take any risks when it came to his people, so that was just about expected.

"Let\'s go nail this," Qiao said to Carrie when the hour was over. Being soldiers, they were trained to be time conscious, and it was a habit that came naturally to them. This is why they were on their way to the boardroom at ten minutes to ten o\'clock.

"Yeah," the soldiers agreed.

The two commanders were unsure of what to expect in the boardroom. They don\'t know whether they would be well received or that there would be anything other than what the shareholders had agreed on.

Maybe they had just ȧssumed he would be the absent boss, and they would turn the business into their playground and everything they could mess up, but was that going to be possible with the soldiers who were about to walk in?

Was their plan going to work when two sincere and overly dedicated soldiers were coming in through the doors they had never really expected to be sued?

There had been so many speculations, and so many things had happened.. Still, each time, no matter how broken Nikita Pavlenko seemed, he would always surprise everyone, not just within the borders of Todorov but the country as a whole.