chapter 1
1457 Words
Twelve Dollars and a Prayer
POV: ARIA COLE
The eviction notice was pink.
I don't know why that detail stuck with me — of all the things to notice on the worst morning of my life, it was the color of the paper. Pink. Like someone in the county office thought bad news landed softer in a cheerful font on cheerful stationery. It didn't.
I stood in the hallway of my building at six fifty-three in the morning with one bag over my shoulder, a box under my arm, and twelve dollars and forty cents in my pocket. My key no longer worked. I'd tested it four times, which was four more times than necessary and exactly as humiliating as it sounds.
The super didn't look at me when he changed the lock. That was almost kind of him.
Okay, I told myself, shifting the box against my hip. Okay, Aria. Think.
Thinking was something I was good at. It was arguably the only resource I had in consistent supply, which was unfortunate because thinking cannot pay rent. Thinking cannot negotiate with a landlord who stopped accepting partial payments in February. Thinking got me through the foster system, through two years of night school, through the string of mediocre jobs that had sustained me at approximately the level of a plant that wasn't quite dying but definitely wasn't thriving.
Thinking had not, apparently, prevented this.
I made it down the stairs and out onto the street before I allowed myself ten seconds of feeling sorry for myself. I counted them out. One. Two — the morning air hit me and it smelled like exhaust and someone's breakfast and the specific loneliness of being outside when everyone else is still inside. Three. Four. Five — my eyes did something embarrassing that I immediately reversed. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine.
Ten.
Done.
I pulled out my phone and opened the job listings I'd saved the night before. I started walking.
Here is the thing about having nothing: it clarifies your priorities with extraordinary efficiency. I wasn't looking for fulfilling work. I wasn't looking for career growth or a vibrant company culture or whatever language people used when they had the luxury of preferences. I needed a job that paid enough to rent a room — any room, with a door and a lock and four walls — within thirty days.
The first listing was a receptionist role at a dental office in Midtown. I applied for walking. The second was data entry for an insurance firm. Applied. The third was an administrative assistant position at a company called Cross Empire — a name I didn't recognize, a salary figure I had to read three times because the number seemed like a formatting error, and a job description that was vague in a way that should have given me pause.
It didn't give me pause. The salary figure had annihilated my capacity for pause.
I applied and kept walking.
By eleven o'clock I had applied to ten positions, eaten a dollar-fifty worth of pretzel from a street cart, and located a library with outlets where I could sit without being moved along. I had also received exactly one response.
Cross Empire.
Thank you for your application. Mr. Cross reviews candidates personally. Please present yourself at Cross Tower, 47th floor, at 2pm today. Do not be late.
No name. No HR department. No automated warmth. Just that — flat, efficient, faintly threatening in the way only truly powerful institutions manage to be threatening without saying anything technically threatening.
I searched Cross Empire on the library computer.
Damien Cross. Thirty-two. CEO. Self-made from the ruins of his father's collapsed company — rebuilt Cross Empire into a global luxury conglomerate worth somewhere in the territory of four point seven billion dollars. The photos showed a man who was aggressively, inconveniently handsome in a way that felt almost deliberate — like his face was a business strategy. Dark hair. Sharp jaw. Eyes that even in press photographs looked like they were calculating something three moves ahead.
Every article used the same three adjectives: ruthless, brilliant, and private.
Not one mentioned warmth, patience, being or enjoyable to work for.
I went anyway. I had twelve dollars and a pretzel receipt. My negotiating position was not strong.
Cross Tower was exactly what it threatened to be from two blocks away — seventy-two floors of glass and steel and the architectural language of an entity that did not concern itself with how small you felt standing in front of it. The revolving door moved slowly on purpose. Like it was giving you time to reconsider.
I reconsidered briefly. I walked through anyway.
The lobby was cold in the specific way expensive buildings are coclimate-controlledolled into submission, all marble and silence and the soft sound of heels on stone. The receptionist looked at me the way people who work in buildings like this learn to look at people who don't quite belong in them. A two-second assessment filed under a category I didn't want to know.
I gave her my name. She checked her screen. Something has almost imperceptibly changed in her expression.
"You're early," she said. "Forty-seventh floor. Someone will meet you."
The elevator was mirrored. I watched myself on the ride up — one bag, a blouse that was my best one with a small iron mark on the left cuff I kept angling away, a face that gave nothing away that I hadn't decided to give.
You have done harder things than this, I told my reflection.
My reflection looked skeptical but cooperative.
The doors opened onto a floor that was quieter and more intentional than the lobby. A woman was waiting. Dark hair, expensive suit, a smile that reached precisely nowhere near her eyes.
"Aria Cole?"
"Yes."
"I'm Maya. Mr. Cross's assistant." Her gaze dropped briefly to my box. "Leave the heat here."
She said it like she was doing me a favor.
I set the box down.
"Follow me," she said, and turned without waiting.
I followed her down a glass-walled corridor past offices where people worked with the focused performance of people who understood visibility. Nobody looked up. Or they knew better than to.
Maya stopped outside a door at the far end. She pressed a panel and it opened without knocking.
"He'll be with you shortly," she said. "Don't sit until he tells you to."
She left.
I stood in the doorway of the largest office I had ever seen — floor-to-ceiling windows, the entire city laid out below like a map of everything I didn't have access to, a desk that could have hosted a small dinner party, and no Damien Cross anywhere in it.
I didn't sit.
Three minutes passed.
Then footsteps — fast, purposeful, coming from the corridor behind me — and I turned to step out of the doorway at exactly the wrong moment.
He wasn't looking.
The collision was total. Something cold detonated against my chest — water, from the bottle in his hand — and my folder went sideways, papers scattered, and I grabbed the doorframe to keep from going down completely. When I straightened up, blouse soaked, papers on the floor, dignity in a location I could not immediately identify — he was looking at me.
Damien Cross.
In person, the photographs had undersold the problem significantly.
He looked at the water on my blouse. At the papers on the floor. At me — quickly, completely, the way someone looks when they're cataloging rather than actually seeing.
He said nothing.
He stepped over my papers.
He walked to his desk and sat down like nothing had happened. Like I was a weather event he'd passed through. Like the basic question of acknowledging another human being had been considered and dismissed without visible effort.
I stood in the corridor, soaking wet, watching him.
I picked up my papers.
I straightened what was left of my blouse.
I walked into his office.
"You didn't apologize," I said.
The room went very still.
Damien Cross looked up from his desk. Slowly. Like the interruption was so unexpected it required physical recalibration. His eyes found me — dark, precise, and entirely too composed for a man who had just drenched a stranger and walked away.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Something moved across his expression. Fast. Gone. But it was there.
"Close the door," he said.
Low. Flat. Completely certain of being obeyed.
I closed the door.
My heart was doing something inconvenient against my ribs. I told it to stop. It didn't stop.
Twelve dollars in my pocket. Water cooling on my blouse. Papers damp at the edges.
Interview not yet begun.
Already in trouble.
- Writer
