Chapter 4

The Other Man

The restaurant by the river was exactly as ridiculous as Marcus had promised twelve courses of food arranged like tiny sculptures, a wine list longer than some of Elena’s college textbooks, and a view of the water that turned gold and then violet as the evening wore on. She let herself enjoy it without apology. She had spent so many months being careful, being watchful, being the woman who worked twice as hard to be taken half as seriously, that it felt almost illicit to simply sit somewhere beautiful and let a man who liked her make her laugh.

“You’re doing the thing again,” Marcus said, over the fourth course, some delicate arrangement of scallop and citrus she couldn’t have named if her life depended on it.

“What thing?”

“The thing where you look like you’re waiting to be told you don’t belong somewhere.” He said it lightly, but there was real attention behind it, real observation, the kind she wasn’t used to receiving without having earned it first. “You belong here, Elena. You belong wherever you decide to be. I just think somebody should say that to you occasionally, since you clearly don’t say it to yourself enough.”

She felt something loosen in her chest, something that had been wound tight for longer than she could easily trace back. “That’s a very smooth thing to say to someone over scallops.”

“I practiced it in the car,” he admitted, grinning, and she laughed, actually laughed, the kind that came from somewhere unguarded.

It was easy with him. That was the thing she kept noticing, kept turning over how uncomplicated it was to sit across from Marcus Reyes and simply be liked, without subtext, without the exhausting work of trying to decode a silence for its true meaning. He complimented her plainly. He asked her about her family, her ambitions, the version of herself she wanted to become in five years, and he listened to the answers as they mattered. When he wanted something, he said so. When dessert came and his hand found hers again across the table, there was nothing withheld in it, no restraint standing guard over some deeper current she wasn’t allowed to see.

She thought, treacherously, of glass walls and unreadable stillness, and pushed the thought away with more effort than she wanted to admit.

“Can I ask you something?” Marcus said, as they waited for the check. “And you can tell me it’s none of my business.”

“Okay.”

“Kade.” He said the name carefully, watching her. “There’s been talk. Whitmore. The Griggs thing. People are starting to say the CEO has taken a personal interest in your career, and I wondered if you wanted to tell me what that’s actually about, since it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that happens to people for no reason.”

She should have expected the question. She still felt her stomach drop slightly at hearing it out loud, stated so plainly, by someone outside her own tangled thoughts.

“I don’t know what it’s about,” she said, honestly. “I asked him directly. He wouldn’t tell me.”

“But something’s there.”

“I don’t know,” she said again, and hated how uncertain it sounded even to her own ears. “I really don’t, Marcus.”

He nodded slowly, and something shifted behind his eyes not anger, not quite, but a kind of watchfulness that hadn’t been there a moment before. “Just be careful,” he said. “Men like Damon Kade don’t do anything without a reason. And I don’t think you want to find out his reason the hard way.”

It was, she noted distantly, almost exactly what Damon himself had told her about the rest of the building. The thought unsettled her more than she wanted to examine that night.

The coldness started on Monday, and it took her two full days to be certain she wasn’t imagining it.

Damon Kade had never been warm with her, precisely  their interactions before had always carried that particular charge, that current of restraint she’d only recently learned to recognize for what it was. But this was different. This was absent. He passed her in the hallway outside the Whitmore conference room on Monday afternoon and did not so much as glance in her direction. On Tuesday, a scheduling note came down reassigning her from a client call she’d been specifically requested for, with no explanation attached. On Wednesday, Corinne informed her, with visible discomfort, that Mr. Kade’s calendar was full for the foreseeable future should she need anything from the executive office.

She told herself it shouldn’t matter. She told herself, repeatedly, that a return to normal professional distance was exactly what she’d wanted; that she’d stood in his office and demanded he stop whatever strange, unspoken thing had been happening between them, and here it was, stopped.

It didn’t feel like relief. It felt like something had been switched off, and she didn’t like how much she noticed the dark.

By Thursday, she’d had enough of pretending otherwise.

She caught him near the elevator bank at the end of the day, when the fortieth floor had mostly emptied and there was no one left to witness her losing whatever professional composure she had left.

“Are you angry with me?” she asked, before he could so much as greet her.

He looked at her for a long moment, that carefully blank expression settling back over his face like a door closing. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You haven’t looked at me in four days. You pulled me off the Ashford call for no reason. You’ve made yourself completely unavailable, and I want to know why, because the last time I asked you a direct question you at least had the decency to half-answer it.”

“I’ve been busy,” he said. “The company doesn’t run itself, Ms. Vance.”

“Don’t call me that.” It came out sharper than she meant it to, and she saw something flicker behind his eyes at the words a small crack in the composure, gone almost as fast as it appeared. “You called me Elena in your office. Now I’m Ms. Vance again. That’s not busy. That’s deliberate.”

He didn’t deny it. That, more than anything, told her she was right.

“Is this about Marcus?” she asked, and watched his jaw tighten fractionally the first real reaction she’d gotten out of him in days. “Is that what this is? You saw us in the break room and now you’re” She stopped, searching for a word, and landed on the only one that fit. “Punishing me?”

“I don’t punish employees for their personal choices,” he said, tightly. “What you do outside working hours is your own business.”

“Then why does it feel like I’m being frozen out?”

He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had dropped into something lower, more careful, like a man choosing each word with the precision of someone defusing something. “Marcus Reyes is not the man you should be spending your evenings with.”

“Excuse me?”

“He has a reputation in this company that precedes him,” Damon said. “I’d advise you to ask around before you trust it as easily as you seem to be trusting it.”

Something cold moved through her, replacing the earlier hurt with something closer to fury. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to disappear on me for a week and then reappear just long enough to insult the one person in this building who’s actually been honest with me about what he wants.”

“I am being honest.”

“You’re being vague, which is not the same thing, and you know it.” She was breathing harder than the conversation warranted, aware of it and unable to stop it. “You have no right to interfere in my personal life. None. Whatever this” she gestured vaguely between them, unable to name it more precisely “Whatever this is, it doesn’t give you the right to control who I spend my evenings with.”

“I’m not trying to control you.”

“Then what are you trying to do?”

He looked at her for a long moment, and she thought for one suspended second that he might actually answer her. Something in his expression seemed to be weighing it, testing the shape of a truth he hadn’t let past his teeth yet.

Then the elevator doors opened behind her, and the moment folded shut as fast as it had opened.

“Have a good evening, Ms. Vance,” he said, and walked past her into the elevator, and did not look back.

She stood in the empty hallway a long time after the doors closed, furious and unsettled in equal measure, and did not yet understand that three floors below, Marcus Reyes was receiving a phone call he would not mention to her a quiet, controlled warning, delivered in a voice that left no room for argument, informing him in no uncertain terms that his attention toward Elena Vance would not be welcomed a second time.