CHAPTER 2: Cedar And Rain
1190 Words
The elevator was not built for two people who were pretending not to notice each other.
Aria faced forward and kept her eyes on the polished doors. She could see his reflection in the metal. Dark hair. Broad shoulders. He was taller than she had pictured, and he carried himself the way people did when they had never had to try very hard to be the most important person in a room. He stood on the opposite side and said nothing, and the silence pressed in from every direction.
Then she caught his scent.
Cedar and rain. Clean and deep, completely out of place in a building that smelled like recycled air and printer toner. It hit her before she could brace for it, and her wolf surged up from somewhere in her chest with a sharp, sudden alertness that had nothing to do with danger. Her breath hitched. Just once. She pulled it back immediately and forced herself to breathe slowly, the way she had practiced.
He heard it.
She felt his attention shift without seeing him move. It was small, just a change in the air, the way the space around him adjusted toward her. Alpha instincts. He had heard the hitch and drawn his own conclusion about what it meant.
She kept her eyes on the doors.
She had pressed the button for the basement before he got in. The number glowed at the bottom of the panel. Neither of them spoke until he looked at it.
“What are you doing?”
His voice was low and even. Not unfriendly. Not friendly either.
“Shredder run,” she said. “Greg sent me down with these.” She shifted the folders in her arms.
A pause. “No. I mean what are you doing in this elevator. It’s for senior staff and above.”
Aria turned and looked at him for the first time. She kept her face open and a little apologetic, the way someone looks when they’ve made an honest mistake.
“Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I’m new. I probably missed the memo.”
There seemed to be more green than brown in his hazel eyes than she expected. They moved over her face with a quiet, unhurried attention that she recognized as the kind of looking that was actually measuring.
“Every new employee gets the memo,” he said.
“Well.” She held his gaze. “I didn’t get mine.”
Something shifted behind his eyes. Not suspicion exactly, but the kind of attention that came right before it. He didn’t say anything else. His gaze dropped for just a second to the ID card on her chest. She felt it land there and stay for exactly as long as it needed to.
MALIA VOSS. DATA ANALYST.
The elevator reached the ground floor and the doors opened.
Aria stepped out first. The lobby opened up in front of her, all marble floors and high ceilings and the steady noise of a busy building. She was three steps out when she heard him step out behind her, and the lobby shifted. Conversations shortened. Eyes moved and quickly moved away. Two receptionists near the front desk suddenly found reasons to look at their screens.
She turned toward the door marked BASEMENT and walked through it without looking back.
Behind her, it started almost immediately.
“Was that…”
“Yes.”
“And she was in the…”
“The executive lift. Yes. With him.”
“Who is she?”
“Malia something. Data analysis. Started three days ago.”
“Three days? And she’s already…”
“I’m just saying what I saw.”
The basement door swung shut and cut the rest off. Aria walked to the shredder, fed Greg’s folders into it one by one, and let the noise fill the quiet while she got herself together.
He had heard her breathe.
She pressed her back against the cold wall and stared at the ceiling. She needed to be more careful.
Outside on the street, the black car was already waiting.
Marcus was leaning against the passenger door with his arms folded, and the look on his face said he had been standing there longer than he wanted to. He was a broad man with an easy way about him that people tended to mistake for laid-back. He straightened when he saw Ryker coming and pulled the door open, but the grin was already there.
“Three minutes late,” he said. “I was starting to think you got lost. Should I be worried? Do you need a map?”
“Get in the car, Marcus.”
“I’m just saying. Three minutes. For you. That’s basically a news story.”
They both got in. The driver kept his eyes forward. Marcus settled into his seat and let the grin fade into something more like business, though not entirely.
“Anything?” Ryker said.
Marcus exhaled. “Dead end. We swept the last two locations. No sign of Frank or any of his pack.”
The city moved past the windows. Ryker watched it.
“Seven years,” he said. “And the man won’t show his face.”
“It’s possible he’s dead, Ryker.” Marcus said it carefully. “We did a lot of damage. What was left of his pack wouldn’t have been enough to hold together for long.”
Ryker made a low sound that was neither agreement nor argument. Then he moved on.
“What do you know about the new employee. Data analysis. Malia Voss.”
Marcus blinked. “The new hire? Strong record. Finished near the top of her class at Northwestern. Before that she spent two years at a hedge fund in New York, Calloway and Reed. Her data modelling scores from the hiring process were in the top four percent of everyone we’ve tested in the last three years.” He paused. “She’s good. For a human, she’s genuinely good.”
A short pause.
“Also,” Marcus added, in a slightly different tone, “she is very pretty.”
Ryker looked at him.
“That’s what the people on floor 38 are saying,” Marcus said quickly. “I’m just reporting the facts.” He was doing a bad job of keeping his face straight.
“God help me.”
“Oh my God.” Marcus turned in his seat. “Are you interested in her?”
“No.” Ryker said it flat. “There is something off about her. I can feel it.”
Marcus dropped the act. “You think she’s a spy?”
“Maybe.”
“For who? Who would dare send someone into Blackcom?”
Ryker turned back to the window. Chicago sat flat and grey under a white sky, unmoved by the question.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But we’re going to find out.”
He tapped the back of the driver’s seat once. The car pulled into traffic, and the glass tower of Blackcom shrank in the rear window until it was gone.
- Writer
