Monday arrived with the particular hush of a building bracing for someone important, and Mia felt it before she understood why — a shift in the air on the third floor, clerks straightening stacks of paper that didn't need straightening, the security guard at the elevator standing a little taller than usual.
She kept her head down over a decade-old shipping contract and told herself it didn't matter who was coming. It mattered enormously, and she knew it, and she hated that she knew it.
The elevator chimed at eleven, and the whole floor seemed to inhale at once.
Seraphina Draven didn't walk into a room so much as arrive in it, the way weather arrives — sudden, total, impossible to ignore. Conversations paused mid-sentence. A clerk near the window straightened his tie without seeming to n
