Aria could not feel her own feet.
The office sat in darkness, and yellow streetlight spilled in from the window and caught two bodies still standing pressed together at the edge of the desk. The lamp was dead. The only illumination came from the city, thin and amber, laying a pale bar across the carpet and across the front of Ethan Cole's white shirt.
*Aria Marie Voss.*
The name still rang inside her skull like a struck bell. Her pupils were blown wide, she knew it, she could feel the dark swallowing everything, reflecting the dim glow of the window back out of her own eyes. Her chest rose and fell in a rapid, helpless rhythm that she was powerless to slow.
And he was looking at her. Not at her eyes. His gaze stayed locked on the beauty mark beside her nose, as though it were the only part of her that interested him.
*Move,* she told herself. *Move now.*
She pushed off her heels and stepped back, hard, one long stride away from the heat of him.
It was a mistake. The toe of her heel caught on the edge of the carpet. Her balance went, the room tipping sideways, the floor rushing up to meet her.
His hand shot out.
It was fast, faster than any man in a tailored suit had a right to be, and it caught her by the upper arm and held her steady. She stopped falling. She stopped everything. His thumb pressed into the silk of her sleeve, and through that thin barrier she felt the print of every finger, firm and warm and unhurried.
*He caught me. He caught me, and he is still holding on.*
She yanked her arm free.
He let her go. He stepped back once, twice, opening a deliberate, courteous distance between them, as though the previous minute had been a thing that happened to other people. And then the overhead LED lights snapped on, flooding every corner of the room in white, merciless light.
Aria blinked against it. The darkness had been a kind of mercy, and now it was gone. The room was plain again: the oak door, the glass wall, the leather chair, the black glass desk. A man in a white shirt with the top two buttons undone. A woman with a wrinkle in her sleeve.
She smoothed the wrinkle with her hand. The fabric obeyed. Her chin lifted, slightly, and she was almost surprised to find that it could.
"You've got it wrong," she said. "I'm Aria Rivers."
He had already turned away. He walked slowly back toward the black glass desk, unhurried, and picked up the fountain pen, and she watched his back and understood that he had been waiting for exactly this lie.
"You're good at hiding a name," he said. "But you can't hide the way your right index finger taps when you're backed into a corner. Same as Victor Voss."
Her father's name, in his mouth.
She looked down. Against her hip, her right index finger was tapping a steady rhythm on the fabric of her skirt, small and regular as a metronome. *Tap. Tap. Tap.* She had done it since she was nine. She had never once noticed.
It stopped instantly.
*How long has he been digging into me?* The thought ran cold and rapid through her head, one step ahead of her pulse. *How much does he know? He knows everything, and he still let me walk through security this morning? He watched me come up in that elevator and said nothing?*
Ethan picked up a red-tagged file and slammed it down on the glass desk. The crack was sharp and dry, a gunshot in a small room.
"Security's fifty meters from here," he said. "Either you walk out of here in cuffs right now, or you keep being my assistant. Choose."
*Choose.*
She bit the edge of her lower lip. Her eyes flicked, once, to the file on the desk. The red tag. The thick stack of paper under it, the one thing in this building she needed more than air.
There was no real choice in it. There never had been. If she left, she lost the only door she had. If she stayed, she lived inside his cage. But a cage with a window was still a door, wasn't it, if you looked at it the right way.
"An enemy right in front of you is always easier to control," she said slowly. "You're getting overconfident."
He sat down in the leather chair. He uncapped the metal fountain pen with an unhurried twist, as though the matter had been one line on a long agenda and she had given the right answer.
"You can start proving me wrong," he said. "Tomorrow."
* * *
The pantry on floor forty was all white. White cabinets, white counters, white light, and the sun pouring through the large glass window as if the building wanted to expose every thing in it.
Aria stood with her arms crossed in front of the automatic coffee machine. She had slept three hours. Perhaps less. Every time she closed her eyes she felt a thumb on the silk of her sleeve, and so she had given up and come in early, and now she was standing in a pantry staring at a machine as though it were a bomb.
She held a white porcelain cup. The coffee had stopped being a drink some time ago. The dark liquid had risen to the rim and spilled over, dripping in a steady tick onto the steel tray below. *Tick. Tick. Tick.* She watched it fall. She was thinking of nothing at all.
A hand reached past her and hit the off switch.
The nails were painted a deep red. Diana Chen stood right beside her, face blank behind her metal-frame glasses, arms folded now that her work was done.
"Cole Industries' executive assistant can't even manage a cup of coffee?"
Aria startled, snatching her hand back as though the cup had burned. She grabbed two napkins from the counter and began wiping the rim, then the tray, her fingers clumsy and quick.
"I'm sorry, Director Chen. I'll clean it up now."
*Idiot.* She scrubbed harder. *You walked into the lion's den last night and spilled a cup of coffee this morning.*
Diana tore open a sugar packet and poured it into her own cup, slowly, as though each grain were a decision. When she spoke again, her voice was level.
"I don't know what trick you pulled to beat out more seasoned candidates for this position, but don't think you can win Mr. Cole's attention with cheap tricks. On this floor, competence decides everything."
*She has no idea what I am.* The words rose in Aria's mind with something close to relief and something close to grief. *She thinks I'm an ambitious girl with a cheap bag, and Ethan Cole is letting her think it.*
The pantry's glass door swung open.
Marcus Cole walked in with his top vest button undone and his grin turned all the way up, as though he had been waiting outside for the best moment and mistimed it only slightly. "Diana, always hard on the new ones," he said. "Morning, Aria."
Diana rolled her eyes. She grabbed her cup and walked straight for the door, and as she passed him her shoulder knocked deliberately into Marcus's arm. He stumbled a half step, shrugged it off with a laugh, and turned to Aria as though nothing had happened.
"Lunch at the French place downstairs, new hire? I've got a corner table booked."
Aria looked at him. Handsome, warm, careless. Everything his brother was not. The offer sat in front of her like an open door, and every instinct that her father had ever drilled into her said *take it, a man like this talks, a man like this knows where the bodies are buried.*
The corner of her mouth curved into a soft smile.
"I'd love to," she said, and nodded.
*And let's see,* she thought, *how Ethan Cole likes that.*