Something's Wrong With Me

Dorian's POV

The file has been sitting on his desk for forty minutes and he's read her name six times.

Not the whole file. Just the name. Nadia Reyes. He keeps getting to it and stopping like there's something on the other side of those two words that he hasn't figured out yet.

Marcus is watching him from the doorway and not saying anything which means Marcus has been watching him for longer than he just noticed.

"How long have you been standing there," Dorian says without looking up.

"Long enough." Marcus walks in, drops into the chair across the desk, looks at the file. "That's the nine AM."

"I know what it is."

"You've had it open for forty minutes."

"I'm thorough."

Marcus looks at him the way he's been looking at him for fifteen years — like he can see through the answer to whatever is actually going on underneath it. It's the most irritating thing about him. It's also why Dorian pays him what he pays him.

"It's a genealogy consultation," Marcus says. "Estate documentation. You've signed off on forty of these without reading past the first page."

Dorian doesn't answer.

Marcus leans forward and turns the file around so he can see the photo clipped to the front page. Standard headshot. Professional. The kind of photo that's designed to say competent, trustworthy, hire me and nothing else.

He looks at it for a second.

"She's the reason you've been here since seven."

"I'm always here at seven."

"You're usually here at seven with coffee and a phone call. Today you've been sitting in that chair staring at a file photo like it owes you something." Marcus sits back. "What's going on?"

And that's the question Dorian doesn't have an answer for — not one that makes sense, anyway. The honest answer is that he pulled her background check last night after his assistant sent through the meeting confirmation and then sat at his desk at eleven PM looking at a photo of a woman he has never met feeling something he cannot name and cannot logic away.

Not attraction. He knows what attraction feels like. It's a manageable thing, a catalogueable thing. This is not that.

This is the feeling he gets sometimes in the space between sleeping and waking — that reaching sensation, like something just moved in his peripheral vision and when he turns his head it's gone. Like a memory of something that hasn't happened yet.

He's had that feeling his whole life. It has never attached itself to a specific person before.

"Nothing," he says. "Run a deeper check on her."

Marcus raises an eyebrow. "Deeper than the standard?"

"Full workup."

"She's a genealogist, Dorian. She's not a government contractor."

"Then it'll come back clean and we move on."

Marcus looks at him for another second. Picks up the file. Looks at her photo again briefly before he closes it. "I'll have it before lunch."

He leaves.

Dorian leans back in his chair and looks at the ceiling and does the thing he never lets himself do during working hours — he tries to trace the feeling back to its source.

It started last night. 11 PM, her photo on his screen, and his chest doing something that felt less like recognition and more like — relief. The specific relief of finding something you didn't know you'd lost. Which makes no sense because he has never seen this woman before. He has no connection to her name, her firm, her face. He ran the check himself to confirm it. Clean records. No overlap. No history.

They have never met.

He is certain of this.

He is also certain that when she walks through that door in — he checks his watch — fifty-three minutes, something is going to happen that he is not prepared for.

He doesn't know how he knows that.

He just does.

His phone rings at eight forty. Vael.

Dorian looks at the screen for two rings before he answers.

"Edmund."

"Good morning." Vael's voice is the same as it's always been — measured, unhurried, the voice of a man who has never once been caught off guard by anything. Dorian has known him since he was seventeen and he has never heard that voice change. "You have a meeting this morning."

"I have several."

"The nine AM." A pause. "The Reyes woman."

Something goes still in Dorian's chest. "You've seen my calendar."

"Your assistant copies me on your schedule. You approved that arrangement two years ago."

He did. He remembers approving it. He also remembers, suddenly, that he approved it during a period when Vael had just helped him through one of the worst episodes he'd had in years and he would have approved almost anything in the aftermath of that.

"What about her," Dorian says.

"Nothing specific. I just wanted to flag that the Ashvale estate documentation is sensitive. Some of the older records are — complicated. Be mindful of how much access you extend."

"She's a forensic genealogist. I hired her for the documentation."

"Of course. I'm just suggesting you keep the scope limited. At least initially."

Dorian is quiet for a moment. Outside his window the city is doing its usual morning thing — all movement and noise and people who have no idea what goes on in the buildings they walk past.

"I'll keep that in mind," he says.

"Good. How are you sleeping?"

The question lands the way Vael's questions always land — wrapped in concern, slightly too precise. "Fine," Dorian says.

"No episodes?"

"No."

"Good. Call me if that changes."

The call ends.

Dorian sets the phone down and stays very still for a moment. Vael has called him the morning of a routine client meeting exactly once before — two years ago, the week before an episode that left him with three hours of missing time and a junior analyst who had to sign an NDA.

There was nothing routine about that week either.

He picks up her file from the desk. Opens it this time and actually reads it — not just the name, all of it. Her credentials. Her published papers. The forensic genealogy specialization. One paper in particular catches his eye: Transgenerational Memory Patterns in Extended Bloodline Documentation.

He reads the abstract twice.

Then he reads it a third time.

She is a forensic genealogist who specializes in the way the past bleeds into the present through bloodlines.

And Edmund Vael called him this morning to tell him to limit her access.

His intercom buzzes. His assistant's voice. "Mr. Ashvale, your nine AM is here."

He closes the file.

He stands up.

He straightens his jacket and walks toward the door and he tells himself what he always tells himself when something he can't explain starts pulling at the edges of his composure.

It's nothing. You're fine. Keep it together.

He opens the door.

She's standing at the end of the corridor.

And the feeling in his chest — that reaching, relieved, impossible feeling — hits him so hard he actually stops walking for half a second before he forces himself to keep moving.

Not nothing.

Not even close to nothing.

What are you? he thinks, looking at her across the corridor.

She smiles at him like they've never met.

Something in his gut says that's a lie.