Chapter 2

The Man Behind the Curtain

By Friday, the Hendricks account was salvaged, the campaign was back on track, and Elena had almost convinced herself the whole ugly episode was behind her.

Almost.

She might have let it go entirely if it had been the only strange thing to happen that week. But then, on Wednesday, she’d been added without applying, without so much as a conversation with her director to the pitch team for the Whitmore Group, the kind of high-visibility account that people in her position waited two, three years even to be considered for.

“I didn’t put you up for that,” Whitfield admitted, looking almost sheepish about it. “Came down from the executive office directly. Guess someone up there likes your work.”

She’d smiled and said something appropriately grateful and gone back to her desk feeling like the floor had tilted slightly under her chair.

And then on Thursday, a senior manager named Griggs, a man she’d had exactly one uncomfortable interaction with, back in her second month, when he’d made a comment about her outfit that she’d reported and then watched vanish into HR’s silence was abruptly transferred to the Chicago office. No announcement. No warning. Just an email thread that appeared overnight, and an empty desk by ten a.m.

“Okay,” said Priya, dropping into the chair across from Elena’s desk at lunch, “you have to admit that’s weird.”

Priya Malhotra had been Elena’s best friend since their second week at Kade Industries, when they’d bonded over a shared horror of the elevator small talk required of new hires. She was, by her own description, incapable of minding her business, which made her either an excellent friend or a mildly exhausting one depending on the day.

“It’s not weird,” Elena said. “Companies restructure. People get transferred.”

“Griggs gets promoted into a corner office because someone in senior leadership decided to relocate him the week after he creeped you out? Elena. Come on.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“You don’t know that’s not what happened, is my point.” Priya stole a fry off Elena’s plate, entirely unrepentant. “And the Hendricks thing. And now Whitmore. You’ve had, what, three unexplained good things happen to you in eight days? That’s not luck, babe. That’s a pattern.”

“It’s not a pattern. It’s coincidence stacked on coincidence.” Elena said it firmly, the way she said most things she wasn’t fully convinced of.

“Sure. Coincidence.” Priya’s eyes flicked meaningfully toward the ceiling, toward the executive floors somewhere far above the cafeteria. “You know who has the kind of authority to make a senior manager disappear overnight and fast-track a junior strategist onto Whitmore without a single meeting? There’s really only one guy in this building with that kind of reach.”

“Damon Kade does not know I exist,” Elena said, and even as the words left her mouth she thought of the glass balcony, the stillness of him up there, the sensation of being looked at that she still hadn’t managed to talk herself fully out of. “He runs a company with four thousand employees. He doesn’t have time to be personally invested in whether I get put on a pitch team.”

“Okay,” Priya said, in the tone of someone who did not believe a word of that and was choosing, generously, not to press it. “If you say so.”

Three floors up, in a conference room with the blinds drawn against the afternoon sun, Damon Kade was listening to his COO discuss third-quarter projections and thinking about none of it.

“You’re not listening,” said Victor Ansell, not unkindly, once the rest of the room had cleared and it was just the two of them.

Victor had been with Damon since the company was six people in a rented office above a dry cleaner. He was the only person on the fortieth floor who spoke to Damon the way a person speaks to another person, rather than the way people generally spoke to a man who could end careers with an email. It was why he was still the only one Damon trusted completely.

“I’m listening,” Damon said.

“You approved a transfer for Griggs this morning without reading the packet I sent you.”

“I read enough of it.”

“You read the line where his desk happened to be six feet from Elena Vance’s, is what you read,” Victor said her name carefully, watching Damon’s face for a reaction he was too controlled to give. “That’s twice this month you’ve moved pieces on the board for her without telling anyone why. People notice patterns, Damon. Even when they’re not supposed to.”

“She was harassed by that man eight months ago and HR buried it,” Damon said, flat and final, the tone he used to close a subject rather than discuss it. “I corrected an oversight.”

“You corrected an oversight in April, when it happened. This is August. This isn’t correction, it’s” Victor stopped himself, chose a gentler word than the one he’d clearly started with. “Attention. Ongoing attention. And I’m not saying it isn’t warranted. I’m saying you’re not being as careful as you think you are.”

Damon didn’t answer right away. He rarely did, when Victor said something true that he didn’t especially want to hear.

“She’s talented,” he said finally. “The Whitmore team is better with her on it. That’s a business decision.”

“It is,” Victor agreed. “It’s also not the only reason, and we both know it.” He gathered his folder, paused at the door. “I’m not telling you to stop. I’ve known you for fifteen years, and I’ve never seen you do this for anyone. I’m telling you to be careful, because you’re a man who doesn’t do things by half measures, and this is the kind of thing that doesn’t stay quiet forever.”

After he left, Damon stood alone in the conference room longer than he needed to, looking down at the city through the gap in the blinds, at the specific angle of glass and steel that let him see, if he wanted to, a narrow slice of the fortieth floor’s north entrance.

He told himself, again, that it was an oversight. That was a correction. That a man could watch over what belonged to him even a version of belonging he had no right yet to claim without it meaning what Victor seemed to think it meant.

He was, for the first time in a long time, lying to himself, and he knew it.

Elena found out about Marcus’s afternoon meeting with the Whitmore team by accident, catching sight of him through the glass conference room wall on her way back from the printer, and something in her chest made a small, unwelcome leap before she could stop it.

He caught her eye through the glass and grinned, held up two fingers later and she nodded and kept walking, cheeks warm, telling herself it was nothing, the same way she’d been telling herself several things were nothing this week.

It was Friday evening, the office half-emptied out, when she finally let herself look properly at the folder she’d been avoiding all week, the Hendricks incident report, which she’d requested out of simple curiosity, wanting to understand exactly what had saved her.

The correction notice inside was dated 6:14 a.m. the morning of the incident. Hours before Whitfield had even called her in. Hours before anyone in her department could have possibly known there was a problem to fix.

Someone had known before it happened. Someone had been watching closely enough to catch it before it landed.

She sat very still at her desk, the office emptying around her, and felt the shape of something she didn’t yet have a name for settle over her not quite fear, not quite anything she recognized, only the sudden, dislodging certainty that someone in this building had been paying far closer attention to her than she’d ever imagined.

She thought, unbidden, of the glass balcony. Of the stillness of him up there.

She closed the folder and did not sleep well that night.