Chapter 2
Celine
I hit the close button before the doors had finished opening.
My palm was still flat against the panel when the elevator started back down, and I stood with my spine against the cold metal wall and one hand pressed hard to my sternum, like I could physically hold my ribcage in place. The number above the panel ticked downward. I watched it.
We'd parted for three years, and he still stands like that. Like the air around him has simply agreed to stop moving. Like stillness is something he invented.
I pressed twenty-seven.
I had not looked long enough to see his face. I hadn't needed to. My nervous system had recognized him the way it recognized a lit fuse — not with thought, not with memory, but with the immediate, animal certainty that something was about to go very wrong.
Why was he on my office floor? Was he a new hire, or here to see the new CEO? Could he actually be the new CEO? Please, don’t let it be him. Oh no. That would be so dramatic!
I fought to hold back those grim spiraling thoughts, until the doors slid open onto the marketing floor’s frosted‑glass corridor, and Vera Calloway was standing three feet away with a coffee in each hand.
"Weren't you just going up?" she said.
"I came back down."
"I can see that." She fell into step beside me, apparently deciding I was more interesting than wherever she'd been headed. "You need the quarterly? Sophia's not in yet."
"I'll wait," I said, and walked through her office door.
Vera set one of the coffees on the edge of her desk and dropped into her chair. I did not sit. I stood at the corner of her desk with my folder in both hands and breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, slowly, until my pulse dropped back below the register of audible.
"You look terrible," Vera announced, with the cheerful precision she usually reserved for expense reports. "Did you run into the new one on your way up? I heard someone saw him this morning." She lowered her voice. "They said the energy coming off him was something else. Like standing next to a thunderstorm."
"The hallway was cold," I said. "I forgot my heavier jacket."
"...That's it?"
"That's it."
She looked at me for a long moment, then let it go. That was Vera — she pushed until she hit a wall, and then she filed the wall away for later.
Sophia arrived twenty minutes later with a stack of folders balanced against her hip, her coat still half-on. She spotted me, pulled the quarterly report from the middle of the stack without breaking stride, and handed it over.
"Thought you might need this."
"I was going to come find you."
"I saved you the trip."
We spread the report across Vera's desk. Sophia pulled up the figures on her tablet. Vera annotated in the margins with a pen she'd stolen from accounting three months ago and never returned. I focused on the columns of numbers and let the familiar rhythm of it — the narrow, manageable texture of a Tuesday morning — push everything else to the edges.
My shoulders dropped by a fraction.
Then all three of our phones pinged at the same time.
I looked down.
HR ANNOUNCEMENT — All senior staff, please be advised: effective today, Aeterna Corporation's new executive leadership assumes full operational authority. All personnel files are to be updated in the internal system by 11:00 a.m. Staff should remain available for potential organizational restructuring notifications throughout the day.
"Restructuring," Vera said, in the tone of someone turning a suspicious object over in her hands.
"It's deliberately vague." Sophia was already scrolling. "Could mean anything."
I read the word available twice. In institutional language, available never meant what it claimed to. It meant in place. It meant accounted for. It meant someone was already running a list, and your name was on it, and you were simply waiting to find out which column you'd been sorted into.
I hoped, with a specificity that surprised me, that the answer was archives.
"I'm going to go over the Q3 projections with Sophia," I said, pulling up the next document. "There are a few line items I want to check before I file the summary."
Vera raised an eyebrow. "Since when do you need to check line items?"
"Since now," I said, and Sophia moved her chair over without comment.
Forty minutes later, the glass door was knocked on twice — precise, unhurried — and a young man I'd never seen before stepped into the doorway.
He was neat in a way that looked effortless. Early twenties, maybe, by appearance. But the stillness he carried in his shoulders and the particular quality of his gaze — patient, already knowing the outcome of the conversation before it began — that wasn't something you learned in your twenties. I put him somewhere north of two hundred and kept my expression neutral.
He scanned the room once and landed on me.
"Celine Thornfield?"
Full name. No inflection. The back of my neck prickled.
"That's me," I said.
"I'm Lucas, Mr. Valmont's assistant." A brief pause. "He has time to see you now. If you'd come up."
The office went quiet. My mind was reeling. Valmont. Elias Valmont. My ex. He must have known I worked here this whole time, and now he’d sent for me. Have I lost my mind? I pinched my finger hard. Ouch. This was very real.
Reluctantly, I set down my pen. "I'll be up shortly."
"Of course." He smiled — pleasant, immovable, the smile of someone who had been told no in seventeen languages and had simply waited each time. "Whenever you're ready."
He stayed in the doorway.
Vera leaned approximately two inches toward me. "Are you actually making the new CEO wait on his first day?"
"I'm finishing a sentence."
"You stopped writing six seconds ago."
I clicked the pen closed. Gathered my folder. Stood.
Sophia caught my eye for just a moment — not asking, just acknowledging — and I gave her the smallest nod I had: the one that meant I'm fine, and also meant please don't.
The walk to the elevator took ten seconds.
Lucas held the door and stepped in after me, pressed the top floor, and settled into the particular stillness of someone professionally trained not to fill silence. The doors closed. The car began to rise.
I pressed my thumbnail into the center of my palm and held it there.
Standard first-day introduction, I thought. You've sat across from things that could rearrange the molecular structure of everyone in this building without pausing to consider it. You have smiled. You have taken notes. You have walked out with your hands steady.
The reasoning was sound.
Floor twenty-nine. Floor thirty.
The pull in my chest climbed back up with every number, patient and inevitable, like a tide that had simply been waiting for me to run out of shore.
Three years, said the part of my mind that had never once listened to the sound reasoning. He's been gone three years.
Floor thirty-two.
And now he called you up.
The doors opened.
I did not move for one full second.
Then I stepped out.
