Miss CEO, EX-Convict

Elena Reyes

Rosa found me on her couch at six, still awake, the birth record photo pulled up on my phone until the battery died sometime after midnight. She was already dressed for the pharmacy, keys in hand.

"You didn't call last night."

"I know."

"That usually means something happened."

"Something happened."

She sat down on the arm of the couch instead of leaving, even though I could hear her keys clicking against each other, some habit she had when she was deciding whether to be late.

I told her about the birth record. About Adrian's face not moving. About the phone call I wasn't supposed to hear, my mother's estate lawyer, and the three years everyone had spent believing Elena Reyes was in the ground.

Rosa didn't say anything for a while. She picked at a thread on the blanket, working it loose an inch at a time.

"If she's alive," Rosa said finally, "then somebody helped her disappear. A funeral doesn't happen by accident. Somebody signed a death certificate."

"Julian signed it. I remember that from the paper. Grieving son, handled the arrangements himself."

"Then either Julian's part of this, or Julian got lied to same as everyone else."

I hadn't let myself land on either answer yet. Sitting there with Rosa's thread coming loose between her fingers, I still didn't.

"I have to go in today," I said. "The projection's due."

"You're going to walk into that building like nothing happened."

"I don't have another option that doesn't blow everything up before I know what everything is." Whatever Elena had built to disappear, it had been built on top of my conviction. Walking away from Kestrel now meant walking away from the only chance I had to prove that.

She gave me a look I recognized from board meetings, the one that meant she'd already decided not to stop me from making a mistake.

"Be careful with him," she said. "The son. Whatever this does to him, it's not going to make him easier to read."

I told her I would, and she left for the pharmacy twelve minutes late, and I sat with the blanket a while longer before I got up.

The office felt different walking in, though nothing about it had actually changed. Denise wasn't at her desk. Nobody stopped me on my way to the elevator, which felt wrong in a way I couldn't name until I was already at Adrian's floor and realized the usual weight of eyes on the open floor plan wasn't there. Half the desks were empty. A closed-door meeting, maybe, somewhere I hadn't been invited.

Adrian's office door was shut, blinds down for the first time since I'd started working there. I knocked once.

Nothing.

I knocked again, and his assistant appeared from around the corner, the same one whose monitor I'd read the day before, and she looked at me with an expression that made my stomach do something unpleasant.

"He's not in today."

"Do you know when he'll be back?"

"I don't." She hesitated, glanced at the shut door like it might answer for her. "He came in at five this morning, took a few things from his office, and left. Didn't say where."

"Did he say anything about a meeting? Something called Reveal?"

Her face did a small thing, quick, gone before I could read it fully. "I canceled that this morning. He told me to."

I stood there with the projection folder in my hand, the one I'd stayed up two nights finishing, and realized it didn't matter anymore whether the numbers were right.

"Is there someone else I should give this to?"

"You can leave it with me." She held out her hand. I gave her the folder. For a second neither of us moved, folder held between two hands that weren't sure whose it was yet.

I was halfway back to the elevator when my phone buzzed. Unknown number. I almost didn't answer it, then did, because unknown numbers hadn't led me anywhere good lately but they also hadn't led me anywhere I could afford to ignore.

"Is this Vale?" A woman's voice, unfamiliar, careful in a way that sounded rehearsed.

"Who is this?"

"You don't know me. But you found something yesterday that belongs to someone I represent. She'd like to speak with you. Tonight, if that works."

I swallowed before I could stop myself, and I hated that my body reacted before my mind caught up to what was happening.

"Who do you represent?"

There was a pause on the line, short, deliberate. She already knew what the next sentence would do to me.

"Elena Reyes."