Chapter 3

Why Are You Helping Me?

She didn’t plan to confront him. That was the part she kept coming back to later, replaying the morning in her head she hadn’t woken up intending to march into the executive suite and demand answers from a man three levels of hierarchy above her pay grade. She’d woken up intending to file a report, quietly, through the proper channels, the way a person who valued her job was supposed to.

But the proper channels, it turned out, all led back to the same office.

“You’ll want to speak to him directly,” said the woman in HR, not unkindly, sliding the Hendricks folder back across her desk like it had grown too warm to hold. “That correction came from the executive office. I can’t tell you anything beyond that it was authorized personally.”

“Personally by whom?”

The woman’s expression was careful and diplomatic. “You’d have to ask Mr. Kade.”

Which was how, at 4:50 on a Tuesday afternoon, Elena found herself standing outside Damon Kade’s office door with her heart going harder than it had any right to, rehearsing an opening line that kept dissolving the moment she tried to hold onto it.

His assistant, a composed, unreadable woman named Corinne who Elena had exchanged maybe four sentences with in eight months looked up, looked mildly surprised, and said, “He’s actually free. Go on in.”

That, more than anything, should have told her something. Damon Kade was not a man who was ever simply free.

He was standing at the window when she entered, the way she was coming to understand he often stood half-turned from the door, city light behind him, a stillness to his shoulders that made the whole room feel like it was arranged around him rather than the other way around. He didn’t turn immediately.

“Ms. Vance,” he said, before she’d said a word. “I wondered when you’d come.”

“You wondered.” She hadn’t meant to sound as sharp as she did, but the last five days had worn something thin in her, and it broke a little now, standing in this office with its glass walls and its view of everything. “You wondered”. So you knew I’d find out.”

He turned then, and looked at her the way he had that first afternoon from the balcony fully, without apology, without the polite deflection most men in his position used to avoid being caught actually looking at anyone. It unsettled her more than she wanted it to.

“I assumed you would, eventually,” he said. “You’re observant. It’s one of the reasons the Whitmore team benefits from having you on it.”

“Don’t.” The word came out before she’d decided to say it. “Don’t do that. Don’t compliment your way around the question.”

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, more the ghost of one, gone before she could be sure she’d seen it. “What’s the question, exactly?”

“Why are you helping me?” She made herself hold his gaze, even though it cost her something to do it. “The Hendricks correction. Whitmore. Griggs’s transfer doesn’t tell me that was a coincidence, I’ve done the math on the timing and it doesn’t add up to anything but you. I want to know why. I want to know why a man who has four thousand employees and better things to do has apparently been paying enough attention to my file to intervene three separate times in a month.”

He was quiet for a moment. She had the sense, watching him, of a man deciding how much of the truth a given moment could bear.

“I’m the CEO of this company,” he said finally. “I’m entitled to know what happens within it. Every employee, every department, every account. That includes yours.”

“That’s not an answer. That’s a job description.”

“It’s the only answer I’m prepared to give you today.”

The evasion landed harder than a direct refusal would have, because it confirmed what she’d already half suspected: that there was an answer, a real one, and he was choosing, deliberately, not to hand it to her. She felt something in her chest twist somewhere between anger and an emotion she didn’t have a name for yet.

“Are you monitoring me?” she asked. “Is that what this is? Some performance surveillance, some executive pet project”

“No.” The word came fast, harder than anything he’d said yet, with an edge that surprised her. He seemed to hear it himself, and reined the next sentence in tighter. “It’s not surveillance. I’m not tracking your keystrokes, Ms. Vance. I read incident reports that cross my desk, and when I see an injustice, I correct it. That’s not a crime. It’s not even unusual for a company this size.”

“It is when it only ever seems to be *my* injustices.”

He didn’t answer that. And the not-answering said more than any sentence could have.

She stood there in the silence a moment, aware suddenly of how close they were not physically, there was still a reasonable stretch of carpet between them, but close in some other way, some current running through the room that had nothing to do with distance. She noticed, in a way she hadn’t let herself notice before, that he watched her like he was memorizing something. That his stillness wasn’t emptiness, the way she’d always assumed it was restraint. There was a difference, and she was only now understanding it.

“You should be careful,” he said finally, “about who you trust in this building.”

“Is that a warning or a threat?”

“It’s the truth. People will be kinder to you than they mean, once they realize you have my attention. And less kind than they should be, out of the same realization. Either way, it will not always be simple.” He held her eyes. “I’d rather you hear that from me than learn it the hard way.”

It wasn’t the answer she’d come for. But it was, she realized with some discomfort, an honest one and it told her, more clearly than anything else in the conversation, that whatever this was, it was nothing. Men did not warn women they were indifferent to the treacherous currents of office politics. They simply let them drown in it.

“This conversation isn’t over,” she said, because she needed the last word, needed to leave the room with something that felt like ground reclaimed.

“I didn’t imagine it would be,” he said, and there it was again that almost-smile, gone as quickly as it came, and infuriatingly, devastatingly attractive in a way she was going to have to spend considerable energy pretending she hadn’t noticed.

She was still turning the conversation over in her head an hour later when Marcus found her in the break room, staring at a cup of coffee she’d made and then forgotten to drink.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said, dropping into the seat across from her with the easy confidence of a man who’d never once, in his life, worried about taking up space he hadn’t been invited into.

“Long day.”

“The Whitmore deck?” He nodded at the folder under her arm. “I heard it’s coming together well. You should be proud of what you built there.”

“Thank you.” She meant it, and it landed easier than anything Damon Kade had said to her all afternoon: no riddles in it, no restraint, nothing she had to work to decode. It was, she thought, almost a relief.

“You free Friday?” Marcus asked, and there was nothing subtle about the question, nothing hidden behind it. “There’s a place near the river that has this ridiculous tasting menu. I want to take you. No work talk allowed.”

She should have said yes immediately. He was easy, and warm, and entirely uncomplicated in a way that felt, after the afternoon she’d had, like sunlight after a long time indoors.

“Yes,” she said, and meant it, and told herself the small, stubborn flicker of guilt she felt saying it had absolutely nothing to do with a man three floors above her who had looked at her like she was something worth memorizing.

Marcus grinned, reached across the table, and let his hand rest briefly over hers, nothing improper, nothing that would raise an eyebrow if anyone walked in, but warm, and certain, and entirely unafraid to be seen.

Neither of them noticed the man standing at the break room’s far doorway, having come down from the executive floor for reasons he would later struggle to explain even to himself, who saw exactly that her hand was under Marcus Reyes’s, and the easy way she let it stay there.

Damon Kade did not make a sound. He simply turned and walked back toward the elevator, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, something in his carefully controlled expression came apart before he could stop it.