Chapter 10 - The First Test

FREYA'S POV

The floor cleared out by seven, that particular hush that only happens after everyone else has gone home, settling over the office. I was packing my belongings into my bag, hoping I could still catch the earlier train, when Raiden’s door opened. “Ms. Dalton. A moment.”

Not a request. It never was.

I walked into his office.

“I need eyes on the Whitmore contract before tomorrow’s call,” he said, once I was standing in his doorway. “Garrick’s already gone. It needs to happen tonight.”

“Of course.” I set my bag down by the chair across from his desk, already reaching for the tablet I used to take notes, but he was moving around the desk toward me instead of handing it over from a distance the way he usually did, like paper could only be passed at arm’s length.

He held the folder out to me directly.

I reached for it. His fingers didn’t quite let go when mine closed around the edge, a half-second delay, deliberate or not, long enough that the backs of his fingers grazed my wrist on the way to release it. Warm and brief. Gone before I could decide if I’d imagined the pressure behind it.

“Page four,” he said, like nothing had happened, already walking back around his desk. “The indemnification clause. I want your read on it before I give mine.”

“My read.” I heard how flat my own voice came out and hated it. “I’m not a lawyer.”

“You don’t need to be. I want to know what strikes you as wrong before someone tells you what’s supposed to be wrong.” He sat, opened his own copy, didn’t look up. “Most people can’t do that. I want to know if you can.”

I sat because there wasn’t really an alternative, and I read the clause twice before I trusted myself to speak, mostly because I needed the excuse to stop overthinking. “It shifts liability onto us for the second party’s subcontractors. That seems backward for how much we’re paying them.”

He looked up then. Just for a second. Something in his expression shifted. Not quite approval, nothing that soft, but a recalibration, like I’d moved half a step up in his estimation. “Good.”

That was it. One word. He went back to his own copy, made a note in the margin, and the next twenty minutes passed in near-silence; my heart pounding, pages turning, his pen scratching and the hum of the building settling around us like it was just the two of us left in it, which it probably was.

He handed me the next section the same way. Not sliding it across the desk or leaving it in the tray by my elbow, but crossing the small distance between us and putting it directly into my hands, close enough that I could smell him, something clean and expensive underneath it, the same thing I remembered from a hotel room I wasn’t supposed to still be thinking about. His fingers brushed mine again. Longer, this time. Or maybe it only felt longer because I was watching for it.

I told myself it was nothing. Two people working late on a real deadline for a real contract that had real consequences if we got it wrong. Nothing about it required meaning.

Except Garrick had told me himself that Raiden didn’t sit in on interviews. Didn’t hand off files personally. And I'm sure as hell he didn’t keep secretaries two hours past closing time reading indemnification clauses when he had an entire legal department for exactly that purpose.

“You could ask legal to review this,” I said, careful, testing the ground the same way he seemed to be testing mine. “That’s usually who handles this part.”

“I know who handles it.” He didn’t look up from his notes. “I wanted your eyes on it first.”

“Why?”

He set his pen down. The silence that followed had weight to it. It was the kind that made me very aware of how empty the floor was and how close his chair was to mine.

“Because you notice things other people miss,” he said finally. “And I’d rather know that about you now, in a contract, than find out later somewhere it costs more.”

It was a careful, professional answer and I understood, sitting there, that he wasn’t going to give me anything more than that. Not tonight. Maybe not ever, unless he decided the timing suited him.

We finished at nine. He walked me to the elevator himself. Another thing that wasn’t standard, another thing I filed away with the rest of my thoughts and observations that I was collecting against my own better judgment. “Get home safe,” he said, before the doors closed between us.

On the train I sat with my hand curled loosely in my lap, still feeling the ghost of his fingers against my wrist, replaying it from every angle I could manage. It had to be deliberate. Nobody brushed the same spot twice by accident, not a man as controlled as Raiden, not a man who ran board meetings the way other people breathed; easily.

Or it meant nothing at all, and I was the only one in that office tonight who couldn’t stop thinking about a touch that had lasted less than two seconds.

I didn’t know which possibility scared me more.