The Girl Who Didn’t Flinch

Lyra

The eviction notice is printed on paper the color of hospital light—too clean for something that dirty.

MAYA QUINN: FIVE DAYS TO CURE OR VACATE, it says, as if eviction were a fever you could ice with coins. Below, Mr. Adami has signed with his cheerful, murderous loop. He added a smiley face once on someone else’s; the tenants in my building still tell that story like a ghost tale.

Maya’s backpack thumps onto the kitchen counter and knocks the notice sideways. “Don’t look at me like that,” she says, sour and sleepy. “I’m pulling night shifts now. I’m helping.”

“Shifts that pay in tips and sore feet,” I say, smoothing the paper that won’t smooth. “It’s not enough. I’ll make a call on my break. We can ask for an extension.”

Her mouth marshals a smile that trips at the start line. “He only gives extensions when he thinks you can catch up. He doesn’t think we can.” She opens the fridge. Its light, a tired eye, stares at three eggs and a jar of mustard. “You’ll be late.”

She’s right. The bus is a rumor when it rains, and today the sky is the color of an old bruise. My phone buzzes with the first meeting reminder: Acquisition alignment — all-hands.

“Eat the eggs,” I say, snatching my bag, the notice, my keys, my other set of keys, the worry that hovers over everything like a broken halo. “Text me when you get to work. If Adami comes by—”

“I’ll call you,” she says. “I’m not twelve.”

She is twenty-two and too small in my head. I kiss the top of her hair anyway, because love is a superstition you practice until it works.

On the landing, Mrs. Vittori is yelling at her cat in Italian and English. The cat, ancient and stripy, pretends he can’t hear either. Down the narrow stairs and into the street, the city smells like wet sidewalks and old coffee, like the hour before everyone decides what kind of people they’re going to be.

I run for the bus. It spits me out six blocks shy of our office because of a detour that wasn’t announced to anyone not clairvoyant. By the time I get to the building, the rain has threaded itself into the ink-blue hem of my dress and my shoes have promoted themselves to sponges.

Our lobby has been “refreshed” with a cardboard standee announcing the acquisition, as if a four-foot smile could make buyouts feel like parties. MARCELLUS TECH + STRATA ANALYTICS: BETTER TOGETHER, it says. The standee’s models grin like people who have never been “integrated.” The receptionist’s new name card says VIV, which is short for a longer name I am too polite to ask about during her first week. She gives me the fluorescent sticker that says HELLO, I’M LYRA in a font that implies my personality will be legible.

“We’re supposed to wear these for the town hall,” Viv whispers. “So the Marcellus people know we’re friendly.”

“I’m friendly,” I say. “Just not to predators.”

Her laugh pops out, unexpected and bright. “There’s coffee. They brought the good kind. With the swans in the foam.”

“The swans are how they blind us,” I say, and stick my sticker to my chest as if it’s armor.

The conference floor looks like a wedding for people who marry spreadsheets: white tablecloths, small pastries arranged like probability distributions, and a stage with a screen that loops the new logo until it starts to look like a rune. Around me, my coworkers make low, anxious thunder: Will there be layoffs. What’s the severance. Who gets to keep the good chairs. The sales team is thrilled because they’re built to sell whatever you put in their hands—telescopes, morals, their mothers if the commission’s right. The research team looks like a flock of owls who found themselves on a beach at noon.

Then the Marcellus people arrive, and there they are: the suits with their glossy eyes, the assistants with their clipboards of justice, the men with the soft hands of people who have never had to carry anything heavier than a secret. They smell like cedar and a storm that will not apologize.

I find my team near the back—Comms and Client Pulse, too small to be threatened and too visible to be safe. Tomás gives me the quick eyebrow hello. “You okay?”

“Fine,” I lie.

“Your sticker is crooked,” he says, rescuing me with a small tug. “You look like a disgruntled librarian.”

“I am a disgruntled librarian.” I check my phone under cover of my hair. No new messages. The eviction notice in my bag feels like it’s screaming in paper language.

A man from Marcellus takes the stage. Not Dante Marcellus—the legend with a face you could use to cut meat—but one of his VPs, the kind who grew that face in a lab. He wears the kind of suit that acts like a second citizenship and says words like synergy without blinking.

“Welcome, Strata family,” he says, doing the thing with his hands that makes him look both humble and in charge. “We’re excited to bring your brilliant minds into a bigger vision.”

The word bigger hits like a door on a hand. I flex the sting out of my fingers. He clicks through slides that show how our product can be repackaged into theirs if we pretend it was theirs all along. He calls this alignment. He calls it unlocking potential. I call it erasing names and writing new ones in permanent ink.

Questions. This is the part where everyone asks not-questions designed to show they are not threats. “How can we support the transition from a brand identity perspective?” “What does success look like in Q3 for the combined entity?” “Do we still get to name the sprints after animals?” Laughter like foam.

The VP’s eyes are glossy marbles. “We value your culture,” he says. “We want to keep what makes Strata special.” Which is the corporate way of saying, We want your soul, but please keep your little quirks. They humanize the trophy.

My hand goes up before I decide it has. Tomás gives me a sideways oh no. The VP points to me because I’m in the back and wearing an ink-blue dress that reads like a calm threat.

An event coordinator slips a wireless mic into my palm.

“Lyra Quinn,” I say. The mic is a hollow bird in my hand. “Client Pulse team.”

“Wonderful,” he says, with a smile that is not a smile. “Client voices are the heartbeat of our work.”

“Right,” I say. “For clients whose contracts require a dedicated Strata team, what’s the plan? We’ve spent a year earning trust by not swapping their manager every time the market hiccups. Are we keeping those commitments, or labeling them ‘legacy’—code for phasing them out—and rewriting them under a new letterhead?”

A few heads turn. This is not a not-question. The VP does not blink. “Great question,” he says, which is executive for not great at all. “We will, of course, honor all legally binding—”

“And the ones that are morally binding?” The words leave my mouth before the part of me that worries about rent can sit on them. “Some of those promises are why we retained clients through the last downturn. We told them they weren’t an invoice number. Are they about to learn they are?”

The room hushes in that polite, carnivorous way. The VP’s smile doesn’t move. He switches to that tone men use with dogs and girls who get too close to the road.

“Let’s keep questions high-level,” he says to the room, not to me. “Operational concerns can be captured after the session. For now, we’ll let the integration leads set the course.”

By now it’s office lore: when someone talks around me instead of to me, I use the line.

“Being spoken to like furniture?” I say, pleasant and bright. “Got it.”

I feel it before I see it—the sensation of standing in front of a glass wall and knowing there’s someone on the other side. My skin recognizes the look the way your body recognizes an incoming storm: hairs, nerves, all the primitive alarms we pretend we don’t have. I turn my head, and there he is.

Not on the stage. At the back, near the door where late power makes its entrances. The man in the stories. Dante Marcellus.

Photographs made him look colder. In person, the cold is the sheath, not the blade. He is very still, the kind of stillness that turns every other movement in the room into noise. His suit is darker than the rain, and his mouth is made for not smiling. When I look at him, his eyes move to acknowledge the physics of it—just his eyes, a centimeter’s concession. The rest of him waits.

The VP realizes who is in the room a second later than everyone else, which is the kind of delay you remember. His spine tries to align with his career; his tone remembers humility. “Of course,” he says, into the mic that suddenly sounds too loud. “Mr. Marcellus.”

Dante doesn’t answer with his mouth. He has one of those faces that says enough without your consent. He’s not frowning. He’s just not wasting expressions. His gaze slides from the VP to me and rests, measuring. Not like a butcher. Like a cartographer.

Charge jumps the small distance across air like the gap between two wires. I hold his gaze because I don’t know how not to. I hold it because my life lately has been a series of men with money telling me what to do, and I am very tired of teaching them to think I agree.

Something that could be a nod acknowledges me. It’s not approval. It’s attention. It lands on my skin and sits there, stern and hot.

“Thank you,” the VP says, retreat already a draft in his voice. “We’ll be clarifying client transition plans via email by end of week. Let’s move on.”

We move on. The slides move on. I put the mic down. Tomás’ elbow finds my side with the gentleness you reserve for dolls in museums. “Are you trying to get fired?” he whispers.

“I’m trying to make them tell the truth faster,” I whisper back. My heart is punching numbers into a keypad. Rent, electric, Maya’s medicine, the legal fees we can’t afford if Mr. Adami decides to be himself. Brave is a currency you spend when you have to.

The town hall dissolves into networking islands and pastry grazing. People gather around gravity: men in suits, women who learned to balance authority with a tolerance for comments about their shoes. I avoid the gravity. I stand near Viv at her reception desk because it feels like being near a shoreline. Viv keeps handing out the good pens and saying “Congratulations” as if you can will a thing true with repetition.

“You were amazing,” she says when there’s a lull. “I’ve never seen anyone say the word ‘sunset’ like a murder threat.”

“I don’t recommend it,” I say. “Adrenaline is a terrible breakfast.”

“Mr. Marcellus is still here,” she murmurs. “His driver told me not to announce him because he’s… observing.”

“Observing what,” I ask, and then feel it again—the sensation of being under a thunderhead that has decided it will not move. I turn.

He’s closer now, as if the building itself has tilted slightly and we both slid toward the same center point. He doesn’t look at the pastries. He doesn’t look at the standee smiling its marketing speak. He looks at people the way people look at maps—assessment, route planning, the occasional correction with a pencil.

His eyes find mine like a lock finding its correct key. Up close, they are not the exact color of anything I have a name for. They are the shade of a window when the room behind it is not your own.

“Ms. Quinn,” he says. He does not ask if I am who my sticker claims. He treats the sticker as a formality we can forgive each other for. His voice is lower than I expected. Not rough. Just tuned to private rooms.

“Mr. Marcellus,” I say, taking care to keep my mouth friendly and my spine unconquered. I’m aware of my damp ink-blue hem, my cheap shoes, the hair that escaped its clip to make an announcement about humidity. He is aware of everything; you can tell by the way he doesn’t fidget with any of it.

“You work with client retention,” he says.

“Client experience,” I correct automatically. “Retention is what happens when experience isn’t a clown suit.”

A beat. The corner of his mouth thinks about doing something and decides to remain loyal to his face. “You asked about morally binding agreements,” he says. “It was not the wrong question.”

“That’s not what your VP thought.”

“He likes to be useful,” Dante says. “Sometimes he confuses utility with truth.”

“An epidemic,” I say.

We look at each other for a small, clean length of time. In it, I sense the thing he does to rooms—quieting them without changing the volume. He’s not charming. Charm is a purchase. He’s… exact. It does something to my stomach that is not hunger and not fear.

“My office,” he says—or maybe asks; it exists somewhere between. “Today, if you’re free at four-thirty.”

“I’m scheduled through five,” I say, because I hate myself a little and love the part of me that refuses to beg. “But I can move something.”

“Good,” he says. No please, no I’d appreciate it. He nods once to Viv, a gesture I file as Thank you for being the gate you are. To me: “Four-thirty. Seventeenth floor. Ask for Rhoades.”

He turns as if the room has finished for him. He does not look back to see whether I watch him leave. This, more than anything, is what makes me watch him leave.

“Did that just happen to you,” Viv says, hushed and reverent, as if we’ve witnessed a saint who believes in fiduciary responsibility.

“I think so,” I say. I look down at my sticker. HELLO, I’M LYRA. It sits slightly crooked again. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Do you want a swan?” Viv holds up a latte like the holy grail.

“I want a job,” I say, and press my palm to my bag where the eviction notice waits, crinkling like a bad omen. “And five more days.”

At four twenty-six, I stand outside the seventeenth-floor doors with a mouth that tastes like mint gum and regret. The hall is quiet in the way hospitals are—the kind that’s paid for. A man with the shoulders of a doorframe appears. He could be any age between forty and ageless. “Rhoades,” he says, which is both name and greeting. “Mr. Marcellus is expecting you.”

He opens the door. The office beyond is a study in good decisions: dark wood, tall windows, the city arranged like an offering. Dante stands by the glass with his hands in his pockets as if they are dangerous at rest.

He turns when I step in. The air does that thing again—the charge, the weather. I can’t tell if he brings the storm in or the storm brings him.

“Ms. Quinn,” he says. “Close the door, please.”

I do, and the soft click feels exactly like the sound a match makes when it thinks about becoming fire.