Questions with no right answers
1809 Words
"Mr. Blackwood?"
The voice belonged to a woman with a tablet clutched to her chest and the tight, professional smile of someone who had learned to sense when the air in a room had changed. Adrian didn't answer her either. He was still looking at Noah the way a man looks at a door he doesn't remember opening.
Elena's pulse was doing something violent in her throat. Every instinct she had five years of instinct, built specifically for moments like this told her to pick Noah up, apologize again, and disappear into the nearest lift before whatever was happening on this man's face finished happening.
"We should let you get to your meeting," she said, already turning Noah by the shoulder. "I'm so sorry again, he doesn't usually"
"Wait."
One word. It stopped her cold in a way shouting never could have.
Adrian crouched an unnatural motion for a man built like a closed door, all sharp lines and no give until he was nearly at Noah's eye level. Noah, delighted by the sudden attention of someone who so clearly belonged in this glass palace, beamed at him.
"How old are you?" Adrian asked. His voice had gone carefully, deliberately gentle, the way you'd speak to something you were afraid of frightening off.
"Five," Noah said. "Well five and a half. Mummy says I have to say five and a half or it's not fair to the half."
Something crossed Adrian's face too fast for Elena to name it. He straightened, and when he looked at her again, the gentleness was gone entirely, replaced by something colder and far more dangerous.
"A word," he said. "Now."
"I have an orientation at nine"
"I said now."
The receptionist with the tablet had gone very still, eyes flicking between them like she was watching a car she couldn't stop from crashing. Elena felt heat rise up her neck not embarrassment, something closer to fury, the specific fury of a woman being spoken to like an employee already caught doing something wrong on a day she hadn't even clocked in yet.
"I have a son to get settled and a job to start," she said, low enough that it wouldn't carry, "so unless you're planning to fire me in the next ninety seconds, *Mr. Blackwood*, I need to go."
"That can be arranged."
She stared at him. He held her gaze without apology, without even the decency to look like the words had cost him anything.
"Excuse me?"
"His father." Adrian's voice dropped further, pitched only for her now, Noah occupied a few feet away tracing a finger through the water sculpture's spill. "Who is he?"
The question landed like a slap. Elena felt the floor tilt very slightly beneath her not because it was an unreasonable thing to wonder, a stranger's child colliding with him in a marble lobby, but because of *how* he'd asked it. Not curious. Not polite. Like a man conducting an interrogation he already believed he knew the shape of.
"That is none of your business."
"It became my business the moment your son ran into me."
"He's five, he ran into a stranger, that's what five-year-olds do"
"That's not what I asked."
"And I'm not going to answer a personal question from a man I've known for four minutes, orientation or no orientation." Her voice had climbed despite herself, and she hated it, hated that her hands had started to shake with something that felt embarrassingly close to fear. "I don't know what you think just happened here, but"
"Nothing happened," Adrian said, too fast, too flat, the words of a man slamming a door on his own thought before it finished forming. "Forget it."
"I intend to."
He didn't move. Neither did she, for one long, ringing second, both of them caught in something neither could name aloud in the middle of a lobby full of people pretending very hard not to be watching.
"Adrian."
The new voice came from a broad-shouldered man in a dark suit who'd materialized at Adrian's elbow with the quiet efficiency of someone used to appearing exactly when needed. His eyes did a fast, professional sweep Elena, Noah, the tension crackling in the three feet of marble between them and something in his expression tightened.
"We should head up," the man said. Calm. Even. A hand landing lightly on Adrian's shoulder, more anchor than gesture. "The Hendricks call is in ten."
Adrian didn't look away from Elena. "Jack"
"Now, Adrian."
Whatever Adrian had been about to say died in his throat. For a moment Elena watched something almost like relief cross Jack's face the relief of a man who had clearly done this before, steered his employer back from some ledge Elena couldn't see the edge of.
"This isn't over," Adrian said, quiet, only for her.
"It never started," Elena shot back, hearing how thin her own voice sounded even as she said it.
Jack's grip on his shoulder turned him, physically, toward the lifts, murmuring something Elena couldn't catch. Adrian went, but slowly, his gaze dragging back once more not to her.
To Noah.
Noah, oblivious, had crouched by the water feature, dragging his fingers through the spill with the single-minded joy of a child who had already forgotten the entire exchange had happened.
Elena didn't breathe again until the lift doors closed.
"Well," she said out loud, to no one, her voice shaking now that there was no one left to hide it from. She looked down at Noah, who glanced up at her, soaking wet to the elbow and grinning.
"Can we come here every day?" he asked.
Elena laughed a short, disbelieving thing, half horror, half hysteria. "Let's get through today first, love."
She did not know, crouching there in a lobby that suddenly felt too large and too quiet, that somewhere above her, in a glass office forty floors up, Adrian Blackwood was already picking up his phone to call the one man in London he trusted to find out exactly who Elena Hart really was.
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