His rule my sin

Three

The acquisition archive on the thirty-first floor smelled like paper and cold decisions.

I arrived at eight sharp and found the space empty except for filing cabinets, a long table, two laptops, and enough case files to bury a courtroom. Dense, important, demanding precision. I could do precision. Precision was safe. Precision kept my hands busy and my mind on something other than the way Dominic Russo had looked at my mouth yesterday like it was a problem he intended to solve.

By day three I had a system. By day five I had a rhythm.

By day six I had a problem.

He started coming by in the evenings.

Not every evening. Not predictably which was almost worse, because unpredictable meant I couldn't prepare, couldn't arrange my composure in advance. He would appear in the doorway between 6:30 and 7:30, jacket usually loosened, sometimes sleeves rolled to the elbows in a way that did things to my concentration I categorically refused to acknowledge. He would review my progress, make specific, intelligent observations about the files, and stand close enough that I was constantly, exquisitely aware of exactly how close he was.

He never touched me.

That was the thing about Dominic Russo that was slowly dismantling me from the inside out. He looked at me like he was thinking about touching me constantly. He stood near me like proximity was something he was allowing himself in place of whatever he actually wanted. And he never, not once, crossed the line.

It was the most effective form of torture I had ever experienced.

"You've been here since seven this morning," he said one evening, stopping beside me to look over the section I was cataloguing.

"The 2015 files are dense."

"You should eat something."

I looked up at him. He was already looking at me had been, I suspected, for longer than the comment required. Up close like this, with the archive room quiet around us and the rest of the building half-empty, the careful boardroom distance he maintained during the day wore thin. I could see the slight tension in his jaw. The way his eyes moved over my face like he was cataloguing something.

"Are you concerned about my nutrition, Mr. Russo?" I asked.

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile but the ghost of one, and the effect of it on my chest was deeply inconvenient. "I'm concerned about my archive project being compromised by an intern who passes out from low blood sugar."

"That's very professional of you."

"I'm a very professional man."

We looked at each other.

The archive room was very quiet.

"There's a file in the 2014 section," I said carefully, pulling my eyes back to the table. "Monroe-Keller Industrial. Arizona."

The almost-smile disappeared. "I know."

"Should I "

"Not yet." His voice was quiet, deliberate. "Leave that one for now."

I nodded. I didn't ask why. Some part of me already sensed that the answer to that question was going to change everything, and I wasn't ready. Not yet. Not while he was standing this close and the light was doing what it was doing to the sharp planes of his face and I was already barely holding myself together.

He reached past me to set a file back in its place, and his arm brushed mine slow, unavoidable and neither of us moved away from it. We stood there for a suspended, breathless second with his arm against mine and the warmth of him along my left side, and I felt his breath shift, just slightly, like the contact had registered somewhere it wasn't supposed to.

"Get some rest," he said quietly. "Eight o'clock."

He left.

I stood alone in the archive room and pressed my hand flat on the table and reminded myself very firmly of every reason why what I was feeling was catastrophic.

I could only remember about three of them. The rest had vacated the premises entirely.