Chapter 6: You Smell Familiar

Clara's POV

The doors slid shut and the elevator began to rise, and I kept my eyes on the glowing numbers above the door because it was the only safe place to look.

Twelve... thirteen... fourteen...

For five years I had promised myself that if I ever saw Damien Sterling again, I would feel nothing at all; I would be ice. But my fingers had gone numb around the handle of my briefcase, and the small wolf inside me, the one I had kept asleep for so long, lifted her head and whined.

"This is a private elevator," I said, in the flat voice I used on bankers. "It only opens for staff keys."

"I have one." Damien held up a black card between two fingers. "Your CFO sent it to my office yesterday, with a note that said please don't be late."

"Then Mr. Vance should have told me who he was sending."

"He didn't know. The papers say Northgate Holdings, and Northgate belongs to me." He slipped the card into his pocket. "So does Sterling Enterprises."

I turned my head just enough to look at him, the way a woman looks at a stranger who has been rude. He was leaner than I remembered, with faint shadows under his eyes and a thin pale scar along his jaw that had not been there before, but the eyes were the same; gold, steady, and far too sharp.

"You hid your name," I said.

"Would you have let me through the door if I hadn't?"

"I would have asked why a man like you needs to hide."

"That's exactly why I hid it."

The elevator hummed on, and I let the quiet hang there for three floors. In the polished steel of the doors I could see both of us side by side, a tall man in charcoal and a woman in crimson who looked, I was pleased to see, completely bored.

"Northgate offered four hundred million dollars for a three-year freight lane," I said. "I assumed the owners were old men in a small office who wanted somebody else to do their driving."

"They were. I bought them out last spring."

"Then you've bought yourself a very expensive habit."

"I've bought myself a lot of things," he said. "Most of them I never asked for."

"Well, you're here now." I faced the doors again. "I'm Valerie Vance, and I have a nine o'clock."

"I know who you are." He didn't offer his hand; he stepped closer, and the small space got smaller. "Born in Millbrook, three states south, no parents, no pack, first company at twenty-two. It's a short file for a woman who owns sixty trucks and a tower."

"Then you've done your homework, and you can save the rest for the boardroom."

I made the mistake of glancing at the scar again, and he caught me doing it.

"A rogue wolf," he said. "Four years ago, at the north gate. Nothing interesting."

"Scars are always interesting to someone."

"Then I'll tell you the rest when you tell me about yours."

"I don't have any."

"Everyone does," said Damien. "Some of us just wear them on the inside."

I didn't answer, because there was nothing safe to say. In the steel of the doors I watched my own mouth press itself flat, and I thought: five years, and he still knows exactly where to put the knife. Only he didn't know. That was what made it unbearable. He was talking to a stranger, and the stranger was the one bleeding.

He stood beside me, close enough that his sleeve brushed mine, and I heard him breathe in, slowly, the way a wolf breathes when he is reading a room.

"You smell familiar," he said.

My stomach dropped through the floor but my face did not move; I had practiced that face in a thousand mirrors. "I wear a perfume from a small shop on Ashgrove Street. Maybe you've walked past it."

"It isn't the perfume. It's what's under it."

"There's nothing under it."

"That's what bothers me." He turned to face me fully, and now there was nowhere to look but at him. "Every wolf smells like something, pine or smoke or rain or the pack they grew up in. You smell like clean paper, and nobody smells that clean by accident, Miss Vance; that kind of nothing is made."

I gripped the briefcase tighter. The tonic I drank every dawn, the one Old Mags brewed for me in a back room across the river, had never failed me once in five years.

He reached past my shoulder and pressed the red button. The elevator shuddered and stopped between the thirty-first floor and the thirty-second, and the hum of the machine died away until all I could hear was my own pulse.

"Press it again," I said.

"In a minute."

"Thirty people are waiting upstairs, and every one of them is paid by the hour."

"Then I'll be quick." His voice went lower. "Under the nothing, there's vanilla."

"I put vanilla in my coffee."

"Not that kind." Something rough crept into his voice, something I had never once heard in it before. "Five years ago I lost someone. I never stopped looking, and in all that time not one woman in any city smelled like her, until your car stopped beside mine at a red light on Harbor Street last month."

I made myself tilt my head, politely curious, like a stranger being told someone else's sad story. "I'm sorry for your loss."

"I didn't say she died."

"You said lost."

"I did." His eyes didn't leave mine. "Lost, and not found."

"Then perhaps she didn't want to be found."

For a moment he said nothing, and a muscle jumped in his jaw beneath the scar. "Maybe," he said at last, quietly. "Maybe she was afraid, and maybe that was my fault."

I wanted to scream at him; I wanted to ask whether he knew how heavy one cruel word could get when a girl was already carrying his child. Instead I lifted my chin. "If you've finished smelling my coat, Mr. Sterling, I'd like to start my day."

He studied me a second longer, and then, to my surprise, he almost smiled. "You're not what I expected."

"And what did you expect?"

"Someone softer. The woman I lost would've been crying by now."

It was a knife dressed up as a compliment, and it slid in all the same. "Then I'm clearly not her."

"No," he agreed. "She was never this cold." His gaze dropped to my free hand, the one I had forgotten to hide, and I saw him notice it trembling against my skirt. "But you're shaking, Miss Vance."

"It's cold in here. Press the button."

He pressed it. The elevator jerked, hummed, and began to climb, and I counted the floors in silence; I watched my reflection in the steel doors, the sharp crimson suit, the hair pinned flat so that nothing behind my left ear could show. That morning Mia had asked me why I was wearing my fighting clothes, and I had told her it was only a meeting, the first lie I had ever told her, even a small one. Then the doors opened on fifty, where a line of staff stood waiting, and Julian beside them, calm gray eyes behind his wire glasses.

"Valerie?" Julian's eyes moved from my face to Damien's and back again. "You're four minutes late. Is everything all right?"

"Everything is fine," I said, and stepped out first, because I could not stand to be one second longer in that box with him.

Behind Julian, thirty staff in dark suits pretended to study their tablets and watched us anyway; I could feel the whole floor leaning toward us like a field of wheat bending in a draft.

Damien came out behind me and shook Julian's hand with a polite, easy smile that I did not believe for one moment. "Mr. Vance, thank you for the key." Then he walked past me toward the boardroom, and as he went he lowered his voice so that only I could hear.

"I'll sign your contract today, Miss Vance. But I'm not leaving this city until I know whose scent is hiding under yours."