CHAPTER 1: MALIA VOSS
1175 Words
5 YEARS LATER.
The woman in the mirror had brown eyes. Aria blinked twice, watching the lenses slide into place. The blue was gone, replaced by a warm unremarkable brown that could belong to anyone. She leaned closer to the mirror and studied the face looking back at her. Sharp cheekbones, lipgloss that she would have never chosen for herself. Hair pinned in a way her father said was professional and approachable. Human.
She practiced the smile. Dragging it to the corners of her mouth, reaching her eyes just enough to look genuine. It was the kind of smile that made people seen without actually seeing them. She had spent weeks in front of the mirror in the safe house getting it right. Frank had watched her and told her it was convincing when it wasn't. It's convincing now.
She held it for 3 seconds, then let it go.
Malia Voss smiled like that. Aria Vance didn't.
She turned from the mirror and reached into the inside pocket of her blazer. The flash drive was still there. Cool and flat against her finger tips. She pressed it once, feeling the edges, then tucked it back into place. Beside it held flat against her ribs by a thin leather strap, was the blade. Two inches. She had not needed it yet, she did not intend to need it today. But the weight of it was a language she understood better than anything in the building, and it steadier her in a way that nothing else could.
She straightened her blazer, picked up her bag from the edge of the sink, and walked out of the restroom, back to Blackcom Enterprises.
The trading floor hit like a wall.
It was the noise first, then the heat of too many bodies in a space designed for screens and numbers rather than people. Traders barked into headsets. Phones rang and were answered and rang again before the first call ended. Someone knocked over a coffee and swore loudly and no one looked up.
The floor ran on a kind of controlled panic that apparently passed for normal here, and everyone on it wore the same expression: wide-eyed, wired, moving too fast.
Floor 38 was a mess.
Aria walked to her desk and sat down.
She did not move after that.
Her screen showed the same market data everyone else on the floor was losing their minds over. A dip in Asian markets had sent ripples through the morning numbers, and the traders around her were reacting the way traders always reacted, which was loud and with great personal investment in things they could not control.
Aria watched the numbers with the surface of her attention and let the rest of her focus drift upward.
Three floors above her, somewhere in the upper levels of this building, was an office she had not yet been able to reach. She had not seen him since she arrived. Three days inside Blackcom and Ryker Blackwood was still nothing more than a name on the building and a ghost in the vents.
The floor she was on was separated from his world by three full levels of management, security clearances, and the kind of quiet that only existed where real power sat.
Down here there was noise. Up there, from what she had gathered from the chatter around her, there was silence.
She tilted her head slightly, just enough to look like she was studying her screen, and listened.
Her wolf hearing moved through the building. She picked up the trading floor first, everything she could already hear, then pushed past it. The floor above: a conference call, two men arguing over a contract clause, someone's chair rolling across a hard floor. The floor above that: quieter. A printer running. Heels clicking down a corridor. The low murmur of a phone conversation she couldn't quite resolve into words.
Nothing she recognized. No voice she could match to the name.
She pulled back and returned to her screen.
Her third day and still, nothing.
The traders around her had mentioned him twice since she started, both times in the clipped, careful way people mentioned someone they were slightly afraid of.
He had walked through the building last week, apparently, and the entire floor had known about it within minutes without anyone saying a word out loud. That was the kind of presence he had. The kind that moved through a building like a change in air pressure.
She wanted to see it for herself. She needed to.
A hand dropped a stack of folders onto the edge of her desk.
She looked up. One of the senior analysts, a man named Greg who had introduced himself on her first day and not spoken to her since, was already walking away.
“Shredder run,” he said without turning around. “Basement. Take the whole stack.”
Aria looked at the folders. They were thick, banded together, and completely useless to her. She picked them up and stood.
The main elevator bank was packed. She could see it from halfway across the floor, bodies pressing in, someone holding the door while two more people squeezed inside. She stood there for a moment with the stack of folders against her chest and watched the doors close.
She turned and took the corridor that ran along the east side of the floor. There was another elevator at the end of it, away from the main bank, away from the noise. She had noticed it on her first day and filed it away the way she filed everything: quietly, without drawing attention to the noticing.
The corridor was empty. The elevator doors were polished to a shine that the ones on the main floor weren't, and the panel beside them had a different quality to it, brushed steel where the others were plastic. The doors were just beginning to close as she reached them. She stepped forward and pressed the button.
The doors slid back open.
The interior was not what she expected. Dark paneling. Recessed lighting. A floor that didn't have the scuffed, worn look of something used a hundred times a day. She stepped inside and turned to face the corridor, shifting the folders in her arms, and reached for the button marked B.
She heard him before the doors closed.
Footsteps, measured and unhurried. The kind that didn't adjust for anyone or anything in their path. Then a hand, large and steady, caught the edge of the closing doors.
They slid open again.
He stepped inside.
Aria kept her eyes forward. She felt the shift in the air the moment he entered, the way the space rearranged itself around him without him doing anything at all. He moved to the opposite side of the elevator and was still, and the doors closed, and for the first time in three days, Aria Vance was exactly where she needed to be.
She did not look at him yet. She made herself breathe.
The elevator began to move.
- Writer
