RUIN ME QUIETLY

Chapter 3

The woman didn't get off on the forty-second floor.

Wren noticed that first — the doors opened, the soft chime sounded, and the woman stayed exactly where she was, arms crossed, watching Wren step out like she was cataloguing something for later.

"You're not getting off?" Wren asked, before she could stop herself.

"Wrong floor." The woman's mouth curved, unhurried. "I like to see who's new before they decide I'm someone worth being nice to."

The doors slid shut between them before Wren could ask what that meant. She stood there a second too long, staring at her own warped reflection in the brushed steel, turning the woman's voice over in her head — the ease of it, the ownership. People who worked in a building didn't talk about a CEO like that unless they'd earned the right to.

She filed it away. She was getting good at that.

Her desk, once she found her way back to it, came with a laptop already logged in, a stack of binders labeled in a handwriting too neat to belong to an actual human being, and a sticky note in the same handwriting: Nine a.m. — do not reschedule. He will notice.

Wren didn't know who'd left it. She assumed, eventually, it didn't matter — every detail of this job seemed designed to remind her that Callum Vance noticed things, that the entire floor operated on the quiet terror of being noticed by him in the wrong way.

She spent the first hour learning his calendar the way she used to study for exams she couldn't afford to fail — memorizing names, cross-referencing who he met with twice a month versus once a year, flagging which meetings had no listed purpose at all. Those were the ones she circled. In her experience, the meetings with no stated purpose were the ones that mattered most.

At eight-fifty, she knocked once on his open door.

"Nine a.m. is in ten minutes," she said. "Conference room B. It's not on the calendar who it's with."

Callum didn't look up from his screen. "It's not supposed to be."

"Should I be there?"

"No." A beat. "You should learn not to ask questions you already know the answer to."

She held her ground in the doorway a second longer than she needed to, long enough that he finally glanced up — and there it was again, that assessing look, like he was deciding whether she was going to be a problem worth solving or a problem worth ignoring.

"Understood," she said, and left before he could decide which.

She didn't find out who the nine a.m. was with until she saw the visitor sign-in sheet at the front desk an hour later, dropped off a set of contracts she wasn't supposed to read and read anyway. One name near the top, in the receptionist's looping hand: S. Marchetti.

She didn't think much of it — a client name, maybe, a vendor — until she caught sight of the woman from the elevator walking out of conference room B forty minutes later, laughing softly at something Callum had said, one hand resting on his forearm just a beat too long for the gesture to be professional.

Wren kept her eyes on her monitor. She didn't need anyone else in the building learning that she noticed things too.

"That's Seraphine," said a voice beside her — one of the other assistants, a woman named Priya who'd introduced herself an hour earlier with the weary efficiency of someone who'd trained four people this year and expected to train a fifth by Friday. "Marchetti. You'll hear the name a lot."

"Client?"

Priya's laugh was short, not unkind, but tired in a way that suggested Wren had asked the wrong question entirely. "Sure. Let's call her that."

"What's she actually?"

Priya glanced toward the closed door of conference room B, then back at Wren, weighing something. "She's the reason every assistant before you either quit or got fired within a month. Not because of anything she does. Because of what happens to him whenever she's in the building." She shrugged, already turning back to her own monitor, done with the conversation. "Ask him yourself if you're brave. I wouldn't."

Wren didn't ask him. Not that day, and not for the rest of the week, though she thought about it more than she wanted to admit — turning Priya's words over at night, in the small apartment with the brick-wall view, trying to fit Seraphine Marchetti into the shape of everything she already knew about Callum Vance and finding that the pieces didn't sit quite right.

A man who ran his empire on cold precision, who dismissed his own assistant without a flicker of guilt, who'd looked at her — the daughter of a man he'd ruined — like she was a mildly interesting puzzle rather than a person, laughed softly at a woman's hand on his arm and let it linger.

She hated how much that detail stayed with her.

By Thursday, she had a working theory of the building: Callum ran on rules, and Seraphine Marchetti was the one exception carved into all of them, and everyone on the forty-second floor had learned a long time ago not to ask why.

She might have let it go at that — filed it under not my business, another detail collected and shelved alongside everything else — if she hadn't been the one to take the call two days later.

"Vance Holdings, Mr. Vance's office," she said, the greeting already automatic.

There was a pause on the other end, the particular quality of silence that meant someone deciding how much to say.

"Tell him," the woman's voice said finally — and Wren recognized it instantly, low and amused even now, "that the wedding's back on. His grandfather's idea, not mine. He'll want to hear it from someone who isn't smiling when she says it."

The line went dead before Wren could ask a single question.

She sat very still for a long moment, staring at the phone in her hand, feeling something she didn't have a name for yet settle low and cold in her stomach — and understanding, with sudden and unwelcome clarity, that whatever she'd walked into three days ago was about to get a great deal more complicated.