CHAPTER 6- TRAPPED

POV: ELENA

He didn't move for a second too long. Something shifted behind his eyes, unguarded, gone as fast as it came and for one absurd heartbeat I thought he might lean in, right there, in a room full of donors and string quartets and Adrian probably still lurking with that grin.

Then the mic on stage caught feedback, some host announcing the next round of bidding, and whatever had been building between us snapped like a rubber band.

"I should go," I said, stepping back before either of us did something about what had almost happened.

"Elena—"

"Consulting materials. Tuesday. I'll be there." I didn't wait for a response. I let the crowd swallow me, pulse doing something erratic I didn’t understand

Tuesday came faster than I wanted. Laurent International took up a glass tower downtown, the kind of building built to make you feel like an ant the second you walked through the revolving doors.

I had spent the whole morning insisting this was purely professional. Numbers, a contract, a paycheck that would finally stop me lying awake doing math on gallery fees. Didn't explain why I'd changed my blouse twice before leaving.

Priya met me in the lobby, badge printed with my name spelled right this time. "He's on floor forty-two. I'll take you up."

The elevator opened onto brushed steel and soft light. I stepped in without a second thought. Priya didn't follow.

"He asked to meet you at the door personally," she said, something odd in her voice I didn't have time to catch before the doors shut.

Twelve floors, then a jolt hard, sudden, like it hit something invisible and then nothing. The lights flickered once and steadied. The numbers froze between eighteen and nineteen.

"You have got to be kidding me," I said, to no one.

I hit the emergency button. A tinny voice promised maintenance had been notified, that it wouldn't be long, all the useless reassurances people give when they have no idea what "long" actually means.

Ten minutes in, voices out in the nineteenth-floor hallway, a maintenance crew, and under it, Mike's.

"I don't need a report. I need the panel open. Now." A pause. "Elena. Can you hear me?"

"Mike?" I pressed a palm to the door. "Yes. I'm here."

"There's a hoistway access door up here. Engineer's got the key. It'll take a while, bear with us."

A narrow hatch in the ceiling scraped open. Mike's face appeared through the gap, kneeling at the edge of an open service door one floor up, a maintenance worker just visible behind him holding a flashlight steady.

"You could've called down," I said.

"I did. But your phone's off."

I checked my bag. Dead, somewhere in the middle of replaying how badly I'd wanted this meeting to go well. Of course it was.

"Twenty minutes till it moves again," he said, settling at the edge of the hatch, close enough to talk, careful enough to stay exactly where he belonged. "You might as well sit."

"You're staying?"

"The engineer needs someone relaying what's happening down there. Might as well be me."

I didn't have a comeback for that, so I sat back to the wall, knees pulled up, looking up at his half-lit shape through the gap.

"This is ridiculous," I said, mostly to fill the silence.

"Which part?"

"Everything. The painting, the wine, the consulting. Now this." I gestured at the ceiling, at him, at the whole absurd chain of events. "You're a bad omen with a good tailor." I said.

That got something out of him, not quite a laugh, close to it, a low huff that softened his face for a second. "You could've said no. To the consulting."

"I could have."

"Why didn't you?"

I looked up, weighing how honest I wanted to be with a man who still made my blood pressure spike on principle.

"Because you were right. I caught something no one else in that room caught. And there's a small, annoying part of me that wanted to know if it was luck, or if I'm actually that good."

"You're that good."

"You don't know that yet."

"Well…I know enough." His voice dropped, the boardroom edge gone from it. "You've corrected me twice in one week. Nobody does that. Not my board, not my family, not anyone who isn't paid a fortune specifically to disagree with me and even then, carefully."

"Maybe you should keep fewer people around you who are scared of you."

"Maybe I don't know how to do that." Quieter than he meant it, almost involuntary. He looked away first, jaw working, and I realized I'd just watched Mike Laurent accidentally tell me something true.

"Why do people fear you?" I asked, softer now.

"Because I've spent my whole life being told that's the only way to keep what's mine." Flat, like a fact recited so many times it stopped hurting, except something in his face said otherwise. "Losing isn't a language I was taught."

"Everyone loses eventually."

"I'm aware."

His eyes found mine, and became softer than I'd seen them all week, not at the gallery, not the boardroom, not the fundraiser. "I lost an argument to a woman with a wine glass a week ago. I still think about it more than I should."

The air went strange and thick, the kind of silence that asks a question neither of us was brave enough to say out loud. He leaned forward at the edge of the hatch, careful, close enough now that I could see the crease between his brows, the exact shade of his eyes in the dim emergency light, never once losing his footing on the floor above, never anywhere but exactly where he'd been the whole time.

"Elena."

My name in his mouth sounded different and quieter. Stripped of the demand it usually carried.

He reached down through the gap, slow, deliberate, giving me every chance to pull back, and his fingers found the edge of my jaw, tilting my face up toward his, and I couldn't tell anymore if the elevator had started moving, or if it was just my heartbeat making the whole world feel like it was.