Chapter 4 The Third Floor

By Evangeline “Eva” Sterling

My desk on the third floor came with a dead plant, a flickering monitor, and a coworker who introduced herself before I’d even sat down.

“You’re the transfer.” She said it like an accusation, leaning over the partition with a mug that read WORLD’S OKAYEST ANALYST. “I’m Priya. Don’t touch the thermostat, don’t take the orange chair by the printer, and whatever you do, don’t get summoned upstairs.”

“Summoned.” I dropped my bag on the floor and pulled out my laptop. “That’s an interesting word choice for a meeting.”

“It’s not a meeting. It’s a summons.” She lowered her voice like the open-plan office had ears, which, given what I now knew about this city, it probably did. “Marcus from compliance got called up there in March. Resigned two weeks later. Didn’t even collect his stapler.”

“Maybe he hated stapling.”

“Denise from HR.” Priya held up two fingers. “Gone in seventeen days. And before her, a guy named Felix who used to bring his dog to work. The dog started whining every time the elevator opened on three. Then Felix got summoned, and a week later, no Felix, no dog.”

“Maybe the dog got a better offer somewhere.”

“You’re not taking this seriously.”

“I just spent an hour in a meeting with the man who owns this building,” I said, dropping into my chair. “I’m taking plenty seriously. I just don’t think it’s the elevator.”

Priya’s eyebrows went up so fast she nearly lost her grip on the mug. “You met Sterling-Vane? On your first day?”

“Apparently I have the wrong kind of paperwork.” I didn’t elaborate. I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to, there were no words yet for what had actually happened in that office, only a phantom heat still living somewhere behind my sternum.

“Nobody meets Sterling-Vane on their first day. Nobody meets Sterling-Vane period. I’ve worked here two years and I’ve seen him in the flesh exactly three times, and one of those was at his own father’s memorial plaque unveiling, which he didn’t even speak at.” Priya set the mug down with a decisive clack. “What’s he like?”

“Tall,” I said. “Intense. Owns a desk that’s apparently held together by spite.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

She studied me for a second too long, like she was deciding whether to push, then thankfully let it go and launched into the building’s quarterly fire drill schedule instead, which was somehow more terrifying than the curse talk. I let the conversation wash past me and turned to my monitor, grateful for an excuse to stop talking about Alastair Sterling-Vane before my face gave anything away.

The morning crawled. I reconciled three regional ledgers, fielded a call from a vendor in Cardiff who insisted his invoice had been paid twice when it hadn’t been paid at all, and ate a granola bar at my desk because the breakroom microwave had, according to a handwritten sign taped above it, “ISSUES.” By noon I’d almost convinced myself the previous day had been some kind of jet-lagged, rain-soaked hallucination brought on by stress and an empty stomach.

Then the elevator chimed.

I didn’t look up. There was no reason to look up — the elevator chimed on this floor roughly every six minutes, a parade of couriers and coffee runs and a man from facilities who kept losing his keycard. But Priya looked up. Priya always looked up, and this time her whole body went still in a way that made the hair on my arms rise before I even understood why.

“Don’t,” she said under her breath.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t look at the stairwell.”

Which, naturally, made me look at the stairwell.

The third floor had one glass-enclosed staircase running up the spine of the building, a clean modern feature some architect had probably been very proud of, open risers, frosted side panels, a a continuous ribbon of pale light from a skylight three floors up. You could see silhouettes moving through it if you caught the angle right, distorted and soft through the glass like figures behind a shower curtain.

A silhouette was standing on the landing between the third and fourth floor. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Perfectly, unnaturally still, the way nothing in an open-plan office full of caffeinated humans ever actually stays still.

“Is that…”

“Don’t say his name out loud,” Priya hissed, already turning back to her screen with the speed of someone who had clearly done this exact maneuver before. “Just don’t. Work. Look busy.”

I didn’t look busy. I looked directly at the stairwell, because some magnetic, traitorous part of my chest had already recognized the shape of him before my brain caught up, and I couldn’t make my neck cooperate with caution.

Through the frosted glass I could just make out the dark line of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders under a coat that probably cost more than my apartment’s deposit. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t climbing the stairs or descending them. He was simply standing on the landing, motionless, facing, I was almost certain, directly toward my desk.

My pulse did something humiliating. It picked up, hard and fast, the exact same dizzy lurch from yesterday’s office, except this time there was no door between us, no four feet of mahogany desk, just twenty yards of office floor and a pane of frosted glass that suddenly felt like the thinnest barrier in the world.

“Eva.” Priya’s whisper had gone sharp with alarm. “Eva, you’re staring.”

“I’m not staring.”

“You are extremely staring.”

I forced my eyes down to my keyboard, heart hammering against my ribs exactly the way it had the day before, that same impossible pull tugging at the center of my chest like something had hooked itself behind my sternum and tightened the line. I typed three random letters into an empty cell just to have something for my hands to do.

When I finally allowed myself to glance back up, just a flick, just one second, I told myself, that’s all I’ll allow, the landing was already shifting. He’d turned. Fast. Too fast, the kind of fast that didn’t match the easy, deliberate way he carried himself in every other moment I’d witnessed.

For half a heartbeat our eyes met clean through the frosted glass, no distortion at all, like the panel itself had gone briefly, impossibly transparent just for us. I caught the exact moment something in his expression cracked, not the cold, dismissive mask from his office, something rawer, hungrier, gone almost before I could name it.

Then he looked away. Too fast. Too sharp. A man caught at something he hadn’t meant to be caught at, already climbing the stairs two at a time before the glass fogged back to its ordinary blur and swallowed him whole.

Priya exhaled like she’d been holding her breath for a year. “Okay. That was not normal.”

“What wasn’t normal?”

“Sterling-Vane does not loiter on stairwells, Eva. Sterling-Vane has people for loitering. He has floors for loitering.” She leaned across the partition, eyes wide. “He was watching you.”

“He was probably just…” I didn’t have an end to that sentence. There was no innocent reason for the owner of a multinational holdings company to stand motionless on a stairwell landing, staring down at the new transfer’s desk, for however long he’d been standing there before I even noticed.

“Just what?”

“I don’t know, Priya.” My hands had gone cold again, the same nervous chill from the lobby yesterday settling back into my knuckles. “I genuinely don’t know.”