Price of his name

The interview

Room 412 smelled like antiseptic and the flowers Sloane hadn’t gotten around to throwing out. Her father was propped up against the pillows, an IV taped to the back of his hand, color back in his face but not enough of it.

“Stress-induced,” the doctor had said. “His heart’s fine. This time.” The way he’d said this time had lodged itself somewhere behind Sloane’s ribs and hadn’t moved since.

“You should go home,” her father said. “Sleep in your own bed.”

“I’m fine on the chair.”

“You’ve been on that chair for two days.”

“Dad.” She didn’t look up from her phone. “Let me worry about me.”

He didn’t push it, mostly because he didn’t have the strength to, and that scared her more than the argument would have. Her father always pushed. Watching him let something go was like watching a building lean.

Her phone buzzed. A name Everett had confirmed she needed Cross Enterprises, open position, executive assistant, temporary contract, immediate start. Posted that morning. She’d been refreshing job boards for an hour out of habit more than hope, and there it was, like the universe had decided to hand her exactly the door she needed and dare her to walk through it.

She didn’t think about it long enough to talk herself out of it.

The fake references took her forty minutes to build a cousin in HR at a company two states over who owed her a favor and didn’t ask questions, a resume with three years of experience she didn’t have and a last name that wasn’t hers. Sloane Reyes. Her mother’s maiden name, easy to remember, hard to trace back to Ashby Restoration if anyone bothered to look.

She didn’t let herself think about what it meant that lying came this easily to her. She just did it.

The interview was on the fifty-second floor, in a glass-walled office that looked out over the whole city, and Sloane had exactly four seconds of composure before the door opened and she realized the man walking in was the one from the lobby.

Her stomach dropped straight through the floor.

He didn’t recognize her. Not right away — she’d worn her hair different, borrowed a blazer from a friend, and she’d counted on four seconds in a chaotic lobby not being enough for a man like him to file her face away permanently. But something in his expression snagged, the same flicker she remembered from the elevator, like he was reaching for a memory just out of range.

“Sloane Reyes,” he said, reading off the resume. “Sit.”

Not a request. She sat anyway, because she needed this job more than she needed her pride intact.

“Three years at Halloran Group,” he said, not looking up. “Why leave.”

“Restructuring. My position was cut.” True, at least, for the fictional woman on paper. “I was told your executive assistant left with no notice.”

“She did.” He finally looked at her, and it took everything Sloane had not to flinch. “You’ll be working directly under me. Long hours. No patience for mistakes. If you can’t keep up, tell me now, because I don’t have time to train someone twice.”

“I don’t make the same mistake twice.”

Something almost like the beginning of a smile crossed his face, gone before it fully arrived. “We’ll see.”

He asked her three more questions — scheduling conflicts, confidentiality, whether she had a problem working late — and she answered all of them clean and fast, the way her father had taught her to talk to customers who were trying to lowball a repair estimate. Never let them see you calculating.

“You’re hired,” he said, standing, already moving on to whatever came next in his day. “Start tomorrow. Seven a.m.”

“That’s it?”

“You want a longer interview?”

“No.” She stood too fast, nearly knocked over the chair. “Seven a.m. I’ll be here.”

He was already at the door when he stopped, hand on the frame, and looked back at her with the same flicker from before, sharper this time, like a word on the tip of his tongue.

“Have we met?”

Her pulse went straight into her throat. “I don’t think so.”

“Mm.” He held her gaze a second too long. “Seven a.m., Ms. Reyes. Don’t be late.”

The second the door shut behind him, Sloane sat back down because her legs didn’t trust themselves to hold her, and pressed both hands over her face, and thought: four seconds in a lobby, and he still almost remembered me.

She had a job at Cross Enterprises. She had eleven days before Voss’s deadline came due, a father in a hospital bed who still didn’t know what she’d just done, and a man she was supposed to hate walking around one floor above her office for eight hours a day starting tomorrow morning.

She didn’t let herself feel anything about it. Not yet. Feeling anything was a luxury for people who weren’t currently lying to everyone in their life at once.

Down the hall, August stood at his own window again, the city spread out below him same as always, except now something about it had shifted and he couldn’t name what.

Sloane Reyes.

He’d have sworn on the company he almost lost a vote over yesterday that he’d never heard that name before this morning. But her face — that was the part that wouldn’t let go of him. He’d seen it somewhere. Recently. And he had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that when he finally placed it, he wasn’t going to like where.