Chapter Two: The Offer

NORA

For three seconds, neither of us breathed.

I stared at the screen in Dominic Blackwood's hand. Look at the person standing closest to him. The elevator hummed around us, polished steel and soft light, and I was trapped in a box with the one person I could not let read my face.

"There's no one else in here," I said.

"No." His voice was quiet. "There isn't."

He was looking at me as if I were a number that refused to balance. I had seen that look before, on landlords and on loan officers. It meant someone was about to decide what I was worth.

"That message isn't about me," I said. "I'm a cleaner. I mop your floors. If someone wants you to be afraid of the person closest to you, they should send it to someone you actually talk to."

"You think I don't know that?" He lowered the phone, slowly, and held it out to me. "Take it."

I snatched it back, my fingers brushing his. His hand was warm. Annoyingly warm, for a man who looked carved out of marble.

"Here is what I know," Dominic said. The elevator began to descend, floor numbers ticking down in red. "A stranger knows your address. A stranger knows something about the shareholder I have been hunting for six months. And a stranger just told you not to tell me anything. You are standing in the middle of something, Ms. Vance, and you do not know how deep it goes."

"I know I'm fired."

"You are." A pause. "That may have been premature."

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

The elevator slowed. The doors opened onto the lobby, all marble and glass and the cold gleam of the Blackwood Global logo behind the security desk. Two guards were already walking toward us at a brisk, purposeful pace, the escort he had promised.

Dominic held up one hand without looking at them. They stopped as if he had pulled a leash.

"Stand down," he said. "She's with me."

The guards exchanged a glance. I had never seen two grown men look so confused.

"Mr. Blackwood," one of them started.

"Hold the elevator. And clear the executive floor. No one comes up until I say so." He turned back to me. "Come with me, Ms. Vance."

"Why would I do that?"

His expression did not change, but something behind it shifted, like a door cracking open in a house you thought was empty.

"Because," he said, "I can protect you. And right now, I think you need it."

DOMINIC

I did not offer her the job because I was kind.

I want to be clear about that, mostly for my own benefit. I offered it because Nora Vance had a message on her phone that mentioned my shareholder, and because she had looked at her own apron when I asked who she was. Those two facts did not belong in the same sentence. I intended to find out why.

That is what I told myself on the way back up to my office.

She sat across from my desk with her hands folded in her lap, back straight, still wearing the gray uniform and looking at my office the way a person looks at a museum. The floor-to-ceiling windows. The skyline. The ugly mahogany desk my grandfather had insisted on keeping, even though it had cost more than a car and I hated it.

"I'll be direct," I said. "You are going to work for me."

"I just spilled coffee on your contract."

"A contract we will replace. The signature page was a draft. I had the final copy locked in my safe the entire time." I let that sit. "I fired you because the floor needed to see it. A CEO who shows mercy over a four-hundred-million-dollar mistake is a CEO who gets eaten."

Her eyes narrowed. "So you humiliated me on purpose."

"I made an example of you. There is a difference."

"There really isn't."

I almost smiled. It was strange. No one spoke to me like that. Not my board, not my uncle, not even Isabelle in the years she had been foolish enough to wear my ring.

"Here is the offer," I said. "You will be my personal assistant, reporting directly to me. Your salary will triple. I will cover your brother's remaining tuition, and I will have security watch your apartment until I find out who sent that message."

Her face went very still. "How do you know I have a brother?"

"You have a school emergency contact form in your HR file. Theo Vance, university sophomore." I held her gaze. "I read everything, Ms. Vance."

She said nothing for a long moment. I watched her weigh it, the way I weigh a merger. She was afraid. She was also, I noticed, calculating. A cleaner did not usually do that.

And her last name. Vance.

It had tugged at something in the back of my mind since the moment she said it, a snag in a very old thread. A name in my grandfather's study. A name no one at the company ever spoke aloud, as if it had been quietly erased.

I filed it away. There would be time.

"Why?" she finally asked. "Why would you do this for a woman you just fired?"

It was a fair question. I had no good answer. The honest one was that I wanted to know what was in her pocket, and the dishonest one was that I felt something when she stood in front of me and did not flinch.

"Security," I said. "That is all."

She looked at me for another long second. Then she nodded, once.

"Fine. I'll do it."

NORA

I said yes because I had to.

That is the truth, and I will tell it to myself again later, when the guilt gets heavy. I said yes because I had four hundred dollars in my account, a brother who needed a roof, and an envelope in my apron that made me the most powerful person in the building and the most hunted.

And I said yes because if someone was leaking my name, then the safest place to hide was right beside the man who was hunting me.

"Your first day starts tomorrow," Dominic said. "Eight a.m. My assistant, Julian, will give you the schedule. You will attend the board meeting with me."

My stomach lurched. The board meeting. The one where my lawyer would cast my first vote in secret, on my behalf, in a room where everyone would be trying to figure out who I was.

"Of course," I said.

"Good." He stood and walked to the window, his back to me. The city sparkled behind him, all that light and money. "One more thing, Ms. Vance."

"Yes?"

"If you lie to me, I will find out."

I swallowed. "I understand."

"I do not think you do." He did not turn around. "But you will."

My phone buzzed in my lap.

Not a message this time. A call. Theo.

I almost declined it. My brother never called during the day. He texted, usually something like "ur the best, send pizza money." But a cold dread crawled up the back of my neck, and I stepped away from the desk and answered.

"Theo? What's wrong?"

"Nora." His voice was barely a whisper. I could hear his breath, fast and shallow. "Nora, there's a man outside the apartment."

The room seemed to tilt. Dominic had turned from the window, watching me, his eyes sharpening.

"What man?" I said.

"I don't know. He rang the bell, and when I looked through the peephole he just stood there. Then he said..." Theo's voice cracked. "He said he knows who you really are. And he said to tell you he's coming back tonight."