His Darkest Desire

Chapter 2: Before Monday

Aria's POV

The contract arrived at 4:47 PM.

I was still on the subway home when my phone buzzed in my bag. I almost missed it — the train was packed, someone's elbow was dangerously close to my ribs, and the man across from me was eating something that smelled aggressively of onions. But I felt the buzz and I twisted awkwardly in the crush of bodies to pull my phone out.

*Cole Enterprises — Official Employment Contract — Aria M. Banks*

I stared at the subject line for the entire rest of the journey home. Forty minutes. I didn't open it. I just stared at it like opening it would make it real in a way I wasn't ready for yet.

It was already real. I knew that.

But sometimes you need forty minutes on a crowded subway with someone's onion lunch in your face just to let a life changing thing settle into your bones properly.

---

My apartment was a third floor walkup in a building that had seen better decades. The hallway light on the second floor had been flickering for three weeks and the landlord had responded to exactly none of my messages about it. I took the stairs in the semi dark the way I always did — hand on the rail, keys already out — and unlocked my door and stepped into the only space in the world that was entirely mine.

It wasn't much. One bedroom, a kitchen that was technically a corner of the living room, a bathroom with tiles that didn't quite match. But every wall had been repainted the exact shade of warm white I wanted. There were plants on every windowsill — real ones that I kept alive with genuine effort. My drafting table sat under the best window, covered in sketches and reference books and two empty coffee mugs I kept meaning to take to the kitchen.

I dropped my bag by the door, kicked off my heels, and stood in the middle of the room in my bare feet on the cool hardwood floor.

Then I opened the email.

The contract was fourteen pages long. I read every single one. Twice. I was not the kind of person who skimmed contracts — my mother had taught me that early, taught me that the things that hurt you were always in the details people hoped you wouldn't read. So I read. I highlighted three clauses I wanted to understand better. I noted the start date — Monday, 8 AM sharp, report to the thirty eighth floor, ask for Claire.

The salary made me sit down on my drafting chair very slowly.

It was more than I had made in the last two years combined.

I put the phone face down on the desk and pressed both hands flat on the surface in front of me and breathed through my nose for a full minute.

Then I called my mother.

---

She picked up on the second ring the way she always did, like she had been waiting even when she hadn't been.

"Baby," she said. Just that. Just the word, warm and immediate, and something in my chest loosened the way it only ever did when I heard her voice.

"Hi Mom."

"You sound funny. What happened? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." I paused. Pressed my lips together. I had planned to say it calmly. Professionally, even. Just deliver the information clean and clear. "I got the job, Mom."

The silence on the other end lasted exactly two seconds.

Then Elaine Banks made a sound I had only heard her make a handful of times in my entire life. Not a scream — my mother was not a screamer. It was softer than that. A long, broken exhale that somehow contained every year of double shifts and skipped meals and quiet prayers over a kitchen table that she had never let me see her cry at.

"Cole Enterprises," she whispered.

"Cole Enterprises," I confirmed.

"Oh, Aria." Her voice was thick. "Oh, my girl."

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and stared at the ceiling and absolutely did not cry. I was not a crier either. The Banks women held it together — it was practically genetic at this point.

"It's a good salary," I said, when I trusted my voice again. "A really good one, Mom. I want to set up that transfer we talked about—"

"Aria, stop—"

"The one for the rent. So you don't have to—"

"Aria." Her voice was firm now, cutting through mine with the particular authority that only mothers possess. "Let me be proud of you for five minutes before you start trying to fix everything. Can you do that?"

I laughed. It came out a little watery. "Five minutes."

"Tell me everything."

So I did. I told her about the building and the marble floors and the city spread out like a painting behind his desk. I told her about the forty minute wait that hadn't rattled me. I told her about the portfolio and the Meridian project and the way he had stopped on that page longer than any other.

I did not tell her about his eyes.

Some things needed more time before they were ready to be said out loud.

---

Jade arrived at eight with wine, a bag of every snack known to mankind, and an energy level that suggested she had been vibrating since my phone call and had not yet found a way to release it.

"Okay," she said, dropping everything on my kitchen counter and spinning to face me with both hands raised. "From the beginning. Every detail. Don't leave anything out."

She was wearing an oversized yellow sweatshirt and her hair was piled on top of her head in a bun that defied gravity. Jade Phillips had been my best friend since the first week of university when she had sat next to me in a lecture hall, taken one look at my color coded notes, and said *you and I are going to be friends because I need you and you need someone to make you leave the library occasionally.* She had been right on both counts.

I poured two glasses of wine while she arranged herself cross legged on my sofa with a bag of pretzels like she was settling in for a feature length film.

"The building," I began.

"Skip the building."

"Jade—"

"Skip. The. Building. Tell me about him."

I sat down on the other end of the sofa and pulled my knees up. Took a sip of wine. Looked at her.

"He's exactly what you'd expect," I said carefully.

Jade pointed a pretzel at me. "You said that on the phone and it was a lie then too. I know your lying voice, Aria. I have known your lying voice for six years. What was he actually like?"

I was quiet for a moment.

"Still," I said finally.

She blinked. "Still?"

"Like — the kind of still that isn't calm. The kind that's..." I turned the wine glass in my hands, searching for the right word. "Contained. Like there's something underneath it that doesn't move because it's chosen not to. Not because there's nothing there."

Jade stared at me.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing." She took a very slow sip of wine. "Absolutely nothing. Continue."

"He barely spoke. When he did it was like every word had been selected in advance and anything unnecessary had already been cut. He looked at my portfolio for a long time. The Meridian project especially." I paused. "And then he just — told me I had the job. No build up, no *we'll be in touch.* Just — Monday."

"And how did he look when he said it?"

"The same way he looked the entire time. Like nothing was happening."

"Mmm." Jade nodded slowly, the way she did when she was thinking something she hadn't decided to say yet.

"What does *mmm* mean?"

"It means nothing."

"Jade."

She held up both hands in surrender. "It means that the way you just spent four minutes describing a man you claim is exactly what you expected is very interesting to me. That's all."

I opened my mouth. Closed it again.

"I start Monday," I said firmly. "And that is the only thing that matters."

Jade smiled into her wine glass. "Absolutely," she said sweetly. "Monday. Right."

I threw a cushion at her.

---

Saturday arrived grey and restless.

I woke up early the way I always did — my body had never learned to sleep past six regardless of what day it was — and lay in bed for a while staring at the ceiling and doing what I privately called *the inventory.* Running through everything that needed doing, everything that needed thinking about, ordering the world in my head before I had to face it in person.

Cole Enterprises. Thirty eighth floor. Monday 8 AM.

Damien Cole's eyes and the way they had taken me apart and put me back together in the space of a single look.

I got up.

I went to my drafting table and I worked for three hours straight on a personal project I had been developing for months — a proposal for a mixed use community space that nobody had commissioned and nobody was paying me for but that I couldn't leave alone. Working settled me. It always had. When everything else was loud and uncertain, making something with my hands and my mind was the one thing that reliably put the world back in order.

By mid morning the grey had lifted slightly and I decided I needed to get out of the apartment.

I showered, pulled on jeans and a worn leather jacket, and walked. That was another thing about me — I walked when I needed to think. The city was best understood on foot, I had always believed that. You couldn't feel the bones of a place from inside a car or underground on a train. You had to walk its streets, look up at its buildings, understand the way light moved between structures at different times of day.

It was also one of the reasons I was good at my job.

I ended up, without entirely meaning to, walking in the direction of the Cole Enterprises building.

I told myself it was coincidence. The building was downtown and I was already heading downtown to the good bookshop on Mercer Street. It made geographical sense. That was all.

I stood across the street from it for a few minutes, hands in my jacket pockets, and looked up at all that black glass reaching into the low grey sky. On a Saturday it was quiet. The revolving doors were still. The lobby visible through the glass was dim and empty.

Except.

On the thirty eighth floor — I counted up from the street the way I had learned to do, a professional habit — there was a light on.

A single window, illuminated against the grey morning.

I looked at it for longer than I should have. Then I turned around and walked to the bookshop and bought two novels I probably wouldn't have time to read and didn't think about it anymore.

Or tried not to.

---

Sunday was for my mother.

It had been our arrangement for years — Sunday afternoons at her place in the neighbourhood I had grown up in, the one I had moved away from the moment I could afford to but that she had stayed in because it was hers and she had never needed to prove anything by leaving it. I took the bus. Forty minutes with a book open on my lap that I made genuine reading progress in, unlike the novels from yesterday which were sitting on my nightstand looking at me accusingly.

Her apartment was on the ground floor of a low brick building with a small garden out front that she maintained with a dedication that I found both admirable and slightly alarming given the size of it. She had tomatoes coming in along the south facing wall. I noticed them as I came up the path.

"The tomatoes look good," I said when she opened the door.

"They do," she agreed, like this was simply a fact we were acknowledging, and then she pulled me into a hug that lasted exactly the right amount of time.

Elaine Banks was fifty four and looked younger. Small, neat, with the same dark eyes she had given me and hands that had worked hard for thirty years and showed it. She was wearing her Sunday clothes — not church clothes, just the particular category of comfortable things she reserved for days off — and the apartment smelled like the rice dish she only made when I was coming over.

"Sit," she said, the way she always said it. "Eat first, talk after."

I sat at the kitchen table that I had done homework at for years and watched her move around the small kitchen with the particular efficiency of a woman who had learned to do everything in a limited space without wasting a single movement.

"How are you feeling about Monday?" she asked without turning around.

"Good," I said. "Ready."

"Nervous?"

"No."

She turned and looked at me over her shoulder with an expression that had been cutting through my deflections since I was seven years old. "Aria."

"A little," I amended. "Not about the work. The work I can handle."

"Then what?"

I picked at the edge of the placemat. "It's a different world there. Everything is—" I paused, searching. "Precise. Nothing is casual. Nothing is warm. And the people who survive in environments like that are a particular kind of person and I need to figure out quickly whether I can be that person or whether I need to just—"

"Be yourself," my mother said simply, turning back to the stove.

"Mom—"

"I know, I know. The world doesn't always reward being yourself, I've heard your argument before." She spooned rice into a bowl and set it in front of me. Sat down across the table. "But you have never once in your life succeeded by pretending to be something you weren't. You got that job because of who you are. Don't walk in there Monday morning and try to be someone else."

I looked at her.

"What if who I am isn't what that place needs?"

"Then that place doesn't deserve you," she said simply. "Eat."

I ate.

After lunch we sat in her small living room with tea and she showed me something on her phone — a video of a cat doing something ridiculous that Jade had apparently sent her because Jade and my mother had a friendship that existed entirely independently of me and that I found both touching and mildly alarming.

"Jade sent me seventeen cat videos this week," my mother said.

"That sounds right."

"She also told me about the CEO."

I looked up sharply. "What did she tell you?"

My mother's expression was innocent in a way that was deeply suspicious. "Just that he was impressive. Her word."

"That's not Jade's word."

"You're right. Her actual word was—" my mother paused with great dignity— "devastating."

I stood up to take the tea things to the kitchen.

"Aria."

"Mom."

"You can talk to me. You know that."

I stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked back at her. She was watching me with that steady, quiet look that had gotten me through every hard thing I had ever faced. The look that said *I see you and I'm not going anywhere.*

"There's nothing to talk about," I said. "He's my boss. That's the entire story."

She nodded slowly. "All right, baby."

I went to wash the cups and absolutely did not think about dark eyes and the quality of a particular kind of stillness.

---

Sunday night I laid out my clothes for Monday.

Black trousers. White blouse. The blazer I had worn to the interview — it had worked once. Heels that were professional without being uncomfortable, because I had learned the hard way that shoes that hurt by noon were a form of self sabotage.

I set two alarms. 5:30 and 5:45. I would be up before both of them.

I stood in the middle of my bedroom and looked at the outfit laid out on the chair and thought about the fourteen floors of black glass and the marble floors and the city spread out like something Damien Cole owned and maybe he did in some way that wasn't legal but was absolutely true.

I thought about the light on the thirty eighth floor on a Saturday morning.

Who works on a Saturday morning at that hour in an empty building? Who sits up there alone above a sleeping city and does — what? What does a man like that do when there is nobody watching?

Stop it,I told myself.

I turned off the light.

I got into bed.

I stared at the ceiling for a while in the dark and listened to the city outside my window doing what it always did — living loudly, relentlessly, without pause.

Monday, I thought.

Just get to Monday.

I was up at 5:15.

Both alarms went off into an empty room.