RIVAL FOUNDATIONS

The Stairwell

The storm rolled in faster than the forecast had promised, which Sienna would later think was exactly the kind of detail that belonged in a story like this one, the kind her father used to tell about buildings that seemed to have opinions about the people working on them.

They were three hours into a site inspection of the Whitmore's upper mezzanine when the first c***k of thunder rattled the old windows hard enough that Devon nearly dropped his tablet. Foster's team had already cleared out for the day, citing the forecast, but Sienna and Damian had stayed behind to walk the scaffolding one more time, checking measurements against the restoration plans before the next phase of work began, and by the time they realized how bad the storm had actually gotten, the building's old wiring had already flickered twice in warning.

"We should head down," Damian said, as the lights flickered a third time and stayed out for a long, uncertain second before stuttering back on.

They were halfway down the scaffolding stairwell, a narrow, temporary structure bolted against the theater's original stone stairs, when the power failed completely, plunging the stairwell into a darkness so total that Sienna's whole body went rigid with the particular fear of not being able to see the ground beneath her feet.

"Don't move," Damian said, his voice close, closer than she'd expected, and she felt his hand find her arm in the dark, steady, careful. "There's a landing about four steps down. I remember it from the walkthrough. We're going to go slow."

They made it to the landing together, and that was when the sound came, a groan of metal that Sienna felt in her chest before she fully processed it as sound, followed by a crash somewhere above them that shook dust loose from the ceiling and left both of them frozen in the dark, hearts pounding.

"Scaffolding section," Damian said, once the echo had faded and nothing else seemed to be falling. "Above us. Sounds like it gave way on the far side, not directly over us, but I don't want to test that."

"We're trapped," Sienna said, and heard her own voice come out steadier than she felt.

"Temporarily. I've got a flashlight on my phone, and it's got enough signal to call for help, but the storm's going to make it slow going. We might be here a while."

They ended up sitting on the landing, backs against the old stone wall, phone flashlight propped between them casting long shadows up toward the collapsed section of scaffolding above, close enough that Sienna could feel the warmth of him along her side in the enclosed space, close enough that neither of them mentioned it, though both of them were clearly aware of it.

"This is a very dramatic way to spend a Tuesday," Damian said, after they'd confirmed help was coming and there was nothing left to do but wait.

"I was going to say the same thing. Marlowe Design does not typically include structural collapse as part of our site visit protocol."

"Cross Holdings either, for the record. Though I'll admit this is more interesting than most of my Tuesdays."

She laughed, an actual laugh, surprised out of her by the absurdity of the whole situation, and felt him relax slightly beside her at the sound of it, like some of his own tension had been riding on whether she was okay.

"Can I tell you something?" he said, after a moment, his voice quieter in the dark. "I've been trying to figure out, for a few weeks now, how to say something without it sounding strategic, or like I'm trying to smooth something over between our companies. And I keep not saying it because there isn't a version of it that doesn't sound like exactly that."

"Say it anyway. We're trapped in a stairwell. This seems like the moment for it, if there ever was one."

"I like working with you," he said. "Not the joint venture, not the credibility it's giving the company, though that matters too. I mean you, specifically. I like the way you fight for the parts of this building that matter, even when it makes my life more complicated. I like that you called me cheap in front of my own engineer and then thanked me two minutes later for saying something true. I don't think I've met many people who do both of those things."

Sienna was grateful for the darkness, because she felt her face heat in a way she wasn't prepared to have witnessed. "That's not what I expected you to say."

"What did you expect?"

"I don't know. Something about the scaffolding budget."

He laughed, low and real. "I have layers, Ms. Marlowe."

"Sienna," she said, before she'd fully decided to offer it. "You can call me Sienna. At this point, after the third week of working sessions and now apparently being trapped in a stairwell together, Ms. Marlowe feels a little formal."

"Sienna," he repeated, and something about the way he said it, careful, like he was testing the shape of it, made her chest do something complicated and unfamiliar. "For what it's worth, I meant what I said. All of it."

"I know," she said. "I believe you. That's the strange part. Three months ago I would have assumed anything a Cross said to me was some kind of angle. I don't think that about you anymore, and I don't entirely know when that changed."

"I could tell you exactly when it changed for me," Damian said. "The coffee station. You told me not to be gracious about your father's work like it meant something coming from me, and I remember thinking, driving home that night, that I wanted it to mean something to you eventually. I didn't examine that thought very closely at the time. I've had more time to examine it since."

They didn't say anything else for a while after that, sitting close together in the dark stairwell, the flashlight throwing long shadows on the old stone walls, and when the emergency crew finally reached them forty minutes later, cutting a path through the debris and helping them down to the lobby, Sienna found she was almost sorry the moment was over, which was its own kind of unsettling realization to carry home with her that night.

The storm had cleared by the time they made it outside, the street slick and shining under the theater's temporary construction lights, and Marcus was already there waiting, having been called the moment the site manager realized two people were unaccounted for. He hugged Sienna hard enough to lift her slightly off the ground, which was so unlike him that she almost laughed through the last of her adrenaline.

"Don't ever do that to me again," he said. "I aged ten years in that parking lot."

"It wasn't exactly planned," Sienna said, though she caught Damian's eye over Marcus's shoulder and felt something pass between them, an acknowledgment of everything that had and hadn't been said in that stairwell.

Foster arrived a few minutes later with the structural crew, already assessing the damage, already talking through what it would take to shore up the scaffolding before work could resume. Damian fell into the conversation easily, back into the version of himself that ran a company, asking sharp questions about the collapse, about whether the failure pointed to a broader problem with the temporary structure or an isolated fault. Sienna watched him work, competent and steady even an hour after being trapped in the dark, and thought about how much of him she was only now starting to actually see.

She didn't get a chance to talk to him alone again that night, not with Foster's team swarming the site and Marcus insisting on driving her home himself, but as she climbed into his car, she looked back once at the Whitmore's lit up facade, and found Damian already looking in her direction, and neither of them looked away first.