Chapter Three The Gregor Brief
803 Words
The office smelled like burned coffee and someone's ambition.
Zara arrived at seven forty-five, which was fifteen minutes before anyone who mattered and forty-five minutes before anyone who didn't. She liked the office before it became itself — before the fluorescents had fully committed, before the open-plan chatter started its daily build from murmur to roar. In the early morning quiet, the place was almost bearable. Almost hers.
She made tea instead of coffee because she was still chasing the coast in small ways, booted up her laptop, and opened the Gregor file.
The Gregor brief was a thirty-page regulatory assessment for a real estate consortium that wanted to build something large and gleaming on the outskirts of Nia and needed someone to tell them what the law permitted and what it merely tolerated. Zara's firm occupied the space between those two things professionally. It paid well. It was genuinely interesting sometimes, the way dissecting something ugly could be interesting — you learned a lot about a place from what its laws allowed.
She read for forty minutes without interruption.
Then Marcus Khalifa walked in.
He didn't work for her firm. She'd never seen him before in her life. He came through the glass doors with the energy of a man who was either very lost or very certain, and those two things, she'd learned, often looked identical from a distance.
He was tall. That registered first, the way it always did, the purely spatial fact of someone taking up more vertical room than expected. Then: expensive jacket worn like he'd forgotten it was expensive. A face that had lived in it — not young, exactly, but unlined in the ways that mattered. Sharp jaw. Eyes that moved around the room the way a chess player's did, clocking things before settling.
They settled on her.
Okay. No. We are not doing this at seven fifty-three in the morning. I have a brief due Thursday.
She looked back at her screen.
He walked to the reception desk, which wasn't staffed yet, looked around, and then — because apparently the universe had opinions — turned and walked toward her.
"Excuse me."
"Reception opens at eight-thirty," she said, without looking up.
"I know. I'm not here for reception."
She looked up.
Up close, his eyes were darker than she'd registered from across the room. Not warm. Not cold either — something in between, like they were deciding.
"Karibu," she said, with precisely zero warmth.
"I'm looking for a David Cedric."
"He comes in at nine."
"Of course he does." Something flickered across his face. Not quite amusement. More like a man revising an estimate. "And you are?"
"Early." She looked back at her screen. "There's a waiting area by the lift."
He didn't move for a second. She could feel him deciding something.
"I'll wait here, if that's alright," he said. "I'm Marcus. Marcus Khalifa."
"Zara Kichea." She said it before she'd decided to. Reflex. Appalling. "The waiting area has better chairs."
"I'm sure it does."
He pulled out the chair across from her and sat down anyway.
Fantastic.
He didn't talk. That was the thing. She'd expected chatter — the kind men like him deployed to fill silence, to colonize it — but he just took out his phone, scrolled something, and left her alone. Which should have been fine. Which was objectively fine.
It was extremely distracting.
She read the same paragraph of the Gregor brief four times.
"Land acquisition," he said, after about ten minutes, not looking up from his phone.
She paused. "Sorry?"
"The Gregor brief." He nodded at her screen. "Section four. The compulsory acquisition clause is going to be the problem. The consortium's timeline doesn't account for the tribunal backlog."
She stared at him.
"You were reading it," he said. "I wasn't trying to."
"But you did."
"Fast reader." He put his phone down. "Also, I'm part of the Gregor consortium. So technically I'm the problem in question."
A long beat.
"Right," Zara said.
Of course you are.
"The tribunal backlog is eighteen months," she said carefully. "We've flagged it."
"Has Cedric flagged it to us?"
"That would be above my pay grade."
He made a sound — not quite a laugh. "But you know the answer."
She met his eyes. "I know several answers. I'm selective about who I share them with."
This time something shifted properly in his expression. Recalibration, she thought. He'd walked in expecting something and was getting something else, and he wasn't sure yet if that was inconvenient or interesting.
Her money was on interesting, which was its own kind of problem.
Stop. Gregor brief. Thursday.
"Fair enough," Marcus said, and looked back at his phone.
She looked back at her screen.
The paragraph still didn't make more sense than it had twenty minutes ago.
- Writer
