Chapter 9: Forty-Two Floors Up

Sloane sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet and her heels finally — finally — off her feet, and stared at nothing.

Secretarial department. Executive floor. His floor.

She turned the formula scoop over in her hand. The kitchen smelled like warm milk and the lavender wipes she used to clean sticky fingerprints off absolutely every surface of her life.

Just resign. The thought circled her brain for the hundredth time. Walk in tomorrow, say thank you, no thank you, and walk back out.

Except Kai Torres's voice kept cutting through: Making Declan Pierce reconsider a decision he's already made? Not very good for your health.

She'd googled Declan Pierce tonight. Deeply. Thoroughly. The kind of research she probably should have done before she walked into his building and accepted a job. Three pages of results — magazine profiles, Forbes features, a Chicago Tribune deep dive titled The Man Who Rebuilt an Empire Before Forty. Cold. Strategic. Relentless. A man who didn't lose and didn't forget.

I am one woman with six toddlers and eleven months of savings left. She pressed the scoop against her forehead. I am an egg throwing myself at a concrete wall.

"Mom?"

She looked up.

Six small silhouettes stood in the kitchen doorway, each one clutching a bottle, each one watching her with eyes that were — heartbreakingly — too perceptive for three-year-olds.

They padded across the tile and crowded into her lap, around her legs, against her sides — warm and solid and smelling like baby shampoo. Sloane opened her arms and gathered as many of them as physics allowed.

"Did somebody bully you?" Cassidy asked, her small face arranged into an expression of devastating seriousness.

"Nobody bullied me, baby."

"Because if they did—" Cole pulled back his tiny fist and demonstrated a punch that connected with nothing but air. "I'd go whoosh."

"Me too, whoosh!" Juliet immediately flung her arms around Sloane's neck and dangled there.

"Me too," Jax murmured softly. Always the quiet one. Always watching.

"Mama, don't be scared." Ava pressed her round cheek against Sloane's arm. "I'm here."

And then there was Dash.

He hadn't said a word. He never did, not yet — still finding his way to language, still translating the world through his eyes instead of his mouth. He pushed forward through the cluster of his siblings, stopped directly in front of Sloane, and extended his tiny clenched fist.

Sloane stared at it.

Her throat closed completely.

She bumped her fist gently against his — and Dash's face split open into the most serious, most certain smile she'd ever seen on any person of any age.

"Yeah," he said firmly. Just that. Like a promise.

Sloane pressed her lips together hard.

Six reasons. She looked at every face. Six reasons to walk into that building tomorrow and not flinch.

---

They slept together on the floor mat that night — all seven of them, Sloane in the middle, six small bodies pressed against her from every direction like the world's warmest, most chaotic weighted blanket. Someone's foot was in her ribs. Someone else's hair was in her mouth.

She had never in her life slept better.

---

She showed up at 8:00 a.m. sharp, forty-second floor, blazer pressed, ponytail tight, spine made of something harder than it had been yesterday.

Kai Torres walked her through it briskly. The executive secretarial department — glass-walled, hushed, running at the frequency of controlled anxiety. Three other assistants at their desks, none of them looking up, all of them radiating the focused silence of people who understood that mistakes on this floor had real consequences.

Her specific assignment: the CEO's conference room. The entire room was bigger than her apartment, all dark wood and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Chicago skyline. A table that seated thirty. Integrated tech she spent twenty minutes figuring out how to operate.

"Meetings run on time," Kai said. "Room is ready fifteen minutes before. You stand at the door, you open it, you close it. Questions?"

"None."

"Good."

The department was quiet after that. Pin-drop quiet. Sloane sat at her assigned desk and felt the difference from the lobby immediately — down there, the world flowed past her. Up here, she was the current. Everything moved through this floor, filtered through these people, landed on that desk at the end of the hall.

His desk.

At 9:30, her phone buzzed. Kai's extension.

Meeting at ten. Conference room.

"Yes." She was already standing.

Fifteen minutes to go. She moved through the checklist — water carafes, presentation remote, window blinds angled against the morning glare, chairs aligned so precisely they could've been measured with a ruler. She checked everything twice, then stood at the door and waited.

The executives arrived in a cluster — seven of them, senior leadership, every face carrying the particular tension of people about to sit in a room with Declan Pierce. Sloane opened the door. They filed in. She reached for the handle to close it.

The elevator at the end of the corridor pinged.

She looked up.

Declan Pierce walked out.

Black suit today. No tie. The top button of his shirt open — just one, just enough — like a man who owned every room he walked into and therefore had nothing to prove. His stride was long and unhurried, and his eyes were already moving down the hallway with the focused intensity of someone cataloguing everything in his path.

They found her immediately.

Sloane's hand tightened on the door handle until her knuckles went white.

Hold. Do not move. You are an employee. You are a professional. You have done nothing wrong and you are simply—

He was walking directly toward her.

The hallway wasn't long. He covered it fast. The air pressure changed with every step he took — she could feel it, that same gravitational pull she'd felt in every room he'd ever entered, the particular way the world reorganized itself around Declan Pierce whether she wanted it to or not.

She pulled the door fully open.

Squared her shoulders.

Looked exactly as calm as she absolutely was not.

He stopped in front of her. Close. That cedar-and-mint scent hit her nervous system like a starting gun.

Those black eyes held hers for one long, unreadable beat — searching, patient, carrying something that lived just below the surface of his composure like a current under ice.

"Good morning, Miss Carter."

His voice was low. Warm in a way that had no business being warm.

Sloane met his gaze without blinking.

"Good morning, Mr. Pierce."

He held her eyes one second longer than necessary. Then he walked past her into the conference room.

The door swung shut between them.

Sloane released the breath she'd been holding since the elevator opened — slow, silent, controlled — and pressed her back flat against the wall beside the door.

Her heart was beating so loudly she was genuinely concerned the man on the other side could hear it through six inches of mahogany.

You're fine, she told herself.

From somewhere inside the conference room, she heard his voice — quiet, precise, already commanding the room — and something deep in her chest pulled toward it like a compass finding north.

You are absolutely not fine.