CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Aria’s POV

The Beaumont Group Tower was exactly the kind of building that made you straighten your posture without being told to.

Forty-two floors of glass and steel rising above the financial district like what had decided the skyline needed restructuring and had simply gone ahead and done it. The lobby alone was made of marble floors, a reception desk that stretched the width of a small apartment, lighting that somehow managed to be both dramatic and tasteful without trying too hard. The category of people who worked here operated in a different level of existence from the one I was coming from.

I signed in at the security desk in my navy blue dungaree work uniform with the company logo engraved almost invisible on the chest. I was directed to the facilities manager, a brisk woman named Helen who met me in the lobby with a laminated access schedule.

“Quarterly service,” she confirmed, scanning the paperwork my cousin’s company had submitted. “You’ll start on the lower basement level and work upward. Floors one through six today, the rest scheduled across the next two visits.” She handed me a temporary access card. “Keep to the service corridors where they’re marked. Executive floors are highly restricted, your card won’t open those anyway, so it’s a non-issue.”

“Understood,” I said.

She was already walking back toward the elevators before I finished the word.

**********

The lower basement smelled like every other corporate building’s basement, recycled air, cleaning products and the faint ghost of a thousand catered lunches passing through the service entrance over years of daily operation.

I got to work immediately, moving through the scheduled areas with focused attention. I hummed a blues sound track that drifted into my head on its own as I worked. The process ran on its own track while my mind suddenly drifted to Arthur.

He had called twice this week with his usual warmth, attention and questions about Bryan. His usual unhurried interest in the most ordinary details of our lives. But underneath the warmth, for the past week or so, there had been a quality of attention that was slightly more careful than usual, issuing more deliberateness in the way he listened that felt different from his normal listening, like a man who was paying attention to specific things.

Arthur was kind and generous and had given us more in the past several weeks than any help other people had rendered in years. The idea that something was off felt ungrateful and the least I would want Arthur to see me as, is being ungrateful.

I moved through the basement levels and into the ground floor service corridor, following Helen’s access schedule with cautious attention, noting each area on the clipboard as I cleared it.

The ground floor service corridor connected at its far end to a short stretch of the main corridor before the next service access point. Helen had noted it as unavoidable on the schedule, it’s a ten-second walk between two service doors that happened to pass through a publicly accessible section of the building.

I pushed through the service door and into the main corridor. It was quiet at this end, the building’s main foot traffic moved through the central atrium on the other side, and this corridor served mostly as a connection point between the lobby wing and the conference rooms.

I was three steps from the next service door when a group of four men came around the corner. All of them were in suits, moving with the coordinated efficiency of people in mid-conversation.

I stepped slightly to the right to give them enough room to pass.

The man at the center of the group was saying something about quarterly projections, his voice low and even, directed at the man to his left who was nodding and making notes on a tablet. None of them looked up yet.

Then the man at the center looked up. His gaze swept the corridor in the automatic way of someone who processed his surroundings without consciously deciding to and it got to me briefly, the way it would have crossed anyone else in that corridor and moved on.

Except that it didn’t move on, it came back, though not with recognition. There was nothing in his expression that indicated he knew me. But behind those dark eyes of his, sharp, still and momentarily arrested, caught on mine with a steadiness that had no business belonging to a two-second exchange between strangers.

I knew that face faintly. The thought flashed through my mind before I could stop it, bypassing the rational part of my brain entirely and landing somewhere less orderly. I knew it the way you knew a song with the body’s memory, the kind that lived below conscious recall and operated on its own timeline.

I was already through the service door before the thought finished forming, the door closing behind me with a quiet click that felt louder than it should have been. My hand went still on the handle of the door at the other side, my heart rumbling in a way I hadn’t given it permission to do.

I stood still in the service corridor. This face faintly reminded me of someone, the same way faces did sometimes, my brain pattern-matching without permission, pulling fragments from old memories and laying them over new ones without caring whether the fit was accurate.

I picked up my clipboard and moved to the next area on the schedule but his face lingered in my brain through the rest of the morning like it had caught on something I had not yet decoded.