Sealed : The Alpha King's Return

CH 6 Ashcroft Tower

The lobby of Ashcroft tower had a fountain in it. An actual fountain, indoors, as if the building's architect had taken one look at "excessive" and decided it wasn't excessive enough.

Alfred stood beside it every tuesday, thursday, and saturday night in a rented security uniform one size too big in the shoulders, watching people who made more before lunch than he made in a month walk past him like he was part of the marble.

Most nights, that suited him fine. Invisibility had its uses.

Tonight, it came with commentary.

"You're doing the face again," Marcus said, sidling up beside him with the particular walk of a man who'd figured out exactly which security cameras had blind spots and used them to sneak snacks from the break room. "The one where you're mentally converting the fountain into rent money."

"I wasn't."

"You so were. I saw the math happening. You got as far as 'eleven years' before you made yourself stop."

"Nine, actually."

"There it is." Marcus grinned, delighted, and offered him half a stolen granola bar like a peace treaty. "You know what your problem is?"

"I have several. Please narrow it down."

"Your problem, Marcus continued, undeterred, "is that you look at all this…" he gestured at the fountain, the gold-veined marble, the elevator bank gleaming like something out of a spaceship "—and you see everything you don't have. Meanwhile I look at it and think, huh, I wonder what the coffee tastes like up to thirty.*"

"You've never been thirty."

"I live in hope, Alfred. It's free and it annoys you less than brooding does."

Before Alfred could answer, the elevator chimed, and a small, immaculate whirlwind of a woman stepped out in heels that cost more than Alfred's entire wardrobe, phone pressed to her ear, already three sentences into a conversation that clearly wasn't going her way.

"No — no, I don't care what Legal says, tell them if the Whitmore contract isn't finalized by friday I'm finding a firm that can actually count to five business…" She stopped short of the fountain, glaring at it like it had personally wronged her, and only then seemed to register the two security guards watching with the particular blank professionalism of men trained not to react to anything.

"What," she said, not really a question, more of a challenge.

"Nothing, ma'am," Marcus said solemnly. "Just admiring the fountain."

She looked at the fountain, then looked at Marcus. Something that might, on a different night, have been the beginning of a smile flickered and died at the corner of her mouth, replaced instantly by the brisk, armored expression of someone who did not have time for security-guard whimsy.

"It's an eyesore," she said, and swept past them toward the doors, heels clicking a rhythm that sounded, to Alfred's ear, almost like an argument she was having with the floor.

The doors closed behind her, the lobby went back to its usual hush.

"Ten bucks says she comes back through here within the hour, still on the phone, still furious," Marcus said.

"I'm not betting against a sure thing."

"See, this is why nobody plays cards with you." Marcus tossed his granola bar wrapper into the trash with the exaggerated form of a man attempting and missing a game-winning shot. "You're no fun when you're right all the time."

She did come back though, forty minutes later, she was, in fact, still on the phone, furious, this time about a caterer instead of a law firm. She didn't look at either of them. Alfred found himself watching anyway, in the brief window before the elevator swallowed her, and couldn't have said exactly why.

Something about the particular way she held herself spine straight, chin level, like she'd learned a long time ago that softness got mistaken for weakness in rooms like this — snagged at him in a way he didn't have a name for, not attractive, not exactly. Recognition, maybe. The specific tiredness of someone carrying more than the people around her realized.

"You're making a new face now," Marcus observed. "Want to name this one, or should I?"

"Shut up."

"I'm just saying, for a guy who claims he doesn't have time for distractions, you sure did watch that elevator for a suspiciously long…."

"I said shut up, Marcus."

"Right, right." Marcus held up both hands in surrender, grinning like a man who'd just found next month's entertainment. "Wasn't gonna say another word about it."

He said several more words about it over the course of the shift, all of them ignored, most of them correct.

By the time their replacement shift showed up at midnight ,they were walking home through streets gone quiet and blue-lit, Alfred had almost managed to convince himself the whole thing was nothing, a stranger in an expensive lobby, one of a thousand strangers he'd pass this year and never think about again.

He almost believed it, right up until he lay down that night and found himself, for the first time in longer than he could remember, thinking about someone other than the dream waiting to drag him under.

He didn't know her name, he didn't need to. Something in him had already filed away as important, in the same wordless, certain way his body seemed to know things his mind hadn't caught up to yet.

He told himself it meant nothing.