Chapter Two — The Elevator Problem (2)

It was, Cec thought, the most adorable thing she had ever seen. And the most dangerous thing about it was that it couldn’t last.

* * *

Elowen stayed late again that night. The deck was coming together—her deck, though Mia’s name would be on it—and she wanted the numbers perfect. Perfect enough that even Dennis couldn’t mangle them. Perfect enough that the client, at least, would know the work was real, even if nobody in the room would ever think to credit her.

At 11:05, she packed up. The building was nearly empty, humming with the lonely electricity of offices after hours. She pressed the elevator button, yawned, and was still yawning when the doors opened.

The man from the corner was inside.

Elowen’s yawn died. Her heart did the complicated thing again, the storm-pressure hum, the animal whisper that said turn around, run, don’t look at his eyes—and she did not run. She stood there, milk-bag-ordinary in her fourteen-year-old coat, looking at the most dangerous-looking man she had ever seen.

He was even taller up close. He filled the elevator the way a held breath fills a room. His coat was black, his tie was black, his eyes were—

She couldn’t look at his eyes. Her gaze skidded off them like a stone off water.

“Are you getting in,” he said, “or are you going to stand there achieving nothing?”

His voice was low and exact, with an accent she couldn’t place and didn’t want to. It did something to her spine.

“I’ll take the stairs,” Elowen said.

“The stairs are locked after ten.”

“Then I’ll wait for the next one.”

“There is no next one.” He was looking at her now, and she could feel it, a physical pressure on the back of her neck. “The building is closing. Get in, Ms. Voss.”

She went still. The name hit her like ice water.

Ms. Voss.

Nobody knew that name in this building. Nobody knew that name in this city, except the people she had spent ten years avoiding. Her hand tightened on her laptop strap. The hum in her chest sharpened into something with edges.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” she said, and her voice was steadier than she felt. “I don’t know your name, Mr.—?”

He smiled. It was not a friendly smile. It was the smile of a man who had been waiting a very long time for someone to ask exactly that question, and was deciding how much to give her.

“Thorne,” he said. “Kael Thorne. Get in the elevator, Elo. I don’t bite.”

“You absolutely bite,” she said.

His eyes changed. Something flickered there—surprise, and beneath it, something ravenous and tender that made her breath catch. “No,” he said softly. “Not you. Never you.”

The doors started to close. Elowen made a decision that she would regret for approximately the next forty-eight hours: she stepped inside.

The doors sealed behind her with a sound like a tomb closing.

The elevator was not big. Kael Thorne was. The combination produced a proximity that Elowen could feel on her skin, a low-voltage current that raised the hairs on her arms. He pressed the button for the lobby. She stared at the floor indicator, counting the floors like a woman counting her heartbeats.

“You’ve been watching me,” she said. “The other night. The scarf.”

“You dropped it.”

“I dropped it in the office. On the fourth floor. At 9:30 in the morning.” She finally looked up, because she was a Voss, and Vosses did not cower, even when every instinct she had was screaming at her to cower. “How did it end up on the street at midnight, in your pocket?”

His gaze held hers. There was something ancient in it, something patient, something that had been waiting so long it had learned to wait forever. “The better question,” he said, “is why a woman who owns more money than some countries chooses to spend her evenings counting paper jams in a fluorescent office.”

Elowen’s blood went cold. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mm.” He stepped closer. Not threateningly—she would have known how to handle threatening. He stepped closer the way gravity steps closer to a falling object, with inevitability. “You’ve been very good at pretending, little ember. Ten years of it. And you’ve been so careful that even your own family’s security doesn’t know how deep the disguise goes. But I know.”

Little ember.

The words went through her like a key in a lock she had forgotten she carried. The glass house. The orchids. The blood on white marble. A boy with silver-grey eyes, looking at her like she was the only thing in the world that had ever mattered—

The elevator shuddered to a stop.

Elowen looked at the indicator. Floor thirteen. The floor that didn’t exist in most buildings, and definitely didn’t exist in this one.

“We’re not moving,” she said.

“No,” he agreed. “We’re not.”

He was close enough now that she could feel the warmth of him, the strange cold-warmth of a man who had been standing in shadow too long. She could smell cedar and winter and something underneath, old and patient and absolutely certain. Her heart was a trapped bird. Her knees had opinions.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“Someone who has watched you for ten years,” he said. “Someone who has watched people talk to you like you’re furniture, and let them, because you wanted it that way. Someone who has stood in the rain outside this building on nights you worked late, because the thought of you walking home alone made him want to burn the city down.” His voice dropped, and the temperature of the elevator dropped with it. “And someone who is done pretending he doesn’t know you, little light.”

Little light.

The memory surged—thirteen years old, the conservatory, the glass roof starlit and the marble floor wrong with red. A boy, half-dead, silver eyes open, watching her small hands glow faintly as she pressed them to the wound in his chest. Her own voice, child-thin: “What is your name?” His voice, like a knife being drawn: “What is your name, little light?”