Vows Of Vendetta

POV: Kira

"You're late again, Mara."

Priya's voice bounced off the tile, teasing on the surface, but I heard the warning folded inside it too. I checked my watch. Six minutes. Six minutes was nothing on any other floor of this building, but the fortieth floor belonged to Rodriguez Maritime, and up here, six minutes could get a person fired.

"I got stuck behind a delivery truck," I said, tying my hair back as I grabbed my cart. "Relax. Nobody's even in yet."

"Somebody's always in." She lowered her voice like the walls had ears, which, in this building, they probably did. "You know how they are about the executive floors."

I did know. I had learned every rule of this place in the six months since I started, which staircase the cameras missed, which supply closet the night guard never checked, which days the family actually came in and which days it was just lawyers pretending to be busy. I knew how to be invisible. Invisible had kept me alive for six years.

I told Priya I would take the east stairwell instead of the elevator, save her the trouble of covering for me twice in one morning, and she rolled her eyes and let me go. The stairwell was cold and quiet, my favorite kind of quiet, the kind where nobody expected anything from me except a clean floor.

I was on the fourteenth landing, spray bottle in one hand, rag in the other, when the door above me opened.

Nobody used this stairwell. Nobody except the cleaning staff and the occasional executive who wanted to skip the elevator line, and it was barely seven in the morning, too early for anyone who mattered.

I heard footsteps coming down unhurried.

I did not look up right away, force of habit, keep your head down, let people walk past you like furniture. But something made me lift my eyes anyway. Maybe it was the way the footsteps slowed instead of continuing to walk past me. Maybe it was just three years of instinct telling me to always know exactly who was in the room with me.

He stopped two steps above me.

I wanted to look away first but I did not. For one long second neither of us moved, and in that second I accessed him the way I accessed everyone, out of habit, out of necessity. Expensive suit, unbuttoned at the collar like he had left in a hurry. Dark hair pushed back like he had run a hand through it more than once that morning. He looked like a man who had not slept.

And his eyes. God, his eyes were beautiful. They were not looking at me the way men usually looked at a cleaner in a stairwell, which was to say not at all. He was looking at me like he was trying to place a name to a face he had seen in a different life.

"Excuse me," I said, stepping to the side so he could pass, keeping my voice flat and easy, the voice I had practiced for three years until it stopped shaking.

He did not move he stared at me for a while

"Have we met before?" he asked, so quietly, almost gentle. Which was worse than if he had been rude about it.

My stomach dropped somewhere around my knees, but I kept my face still, because a still face was the only thing standing between me and everything I had run from.

 "I don't think so. I clean floors twenty through forty five. You'd remember if you'd met me before, sir." I made sure the sir came out light, ordinary, the kind of thing I said to every man in a suit in this building.

He tilted his head slightly, like he was studying a painting he could not quite place. "I don't forget faces." He replied 

"Then I guess I have one of those faces everyone thinks they know." I tried to force a smile and I do not know how well it landed.

For a moment I thought he would let it go. His jaw shifted, like he was about to say something and changed his mind, and he stepped past me down the stairs, close enough that I caught the smell of his cologne, something clean and expensive that I would think about far longer than I wanted to admit.

I let out a breath I had not realized I was holding.

Then he stopped. One landing below me. His hand on the railing.

"What's your name?" he asked, not turning around.

"Mara," I said. "Mara Soto sir."

A long pause. Long enough that I heard my own heartbeat in my ears.

"Mara," he repeated, like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth, like it did not fit right. Then he looked back over his shoulder at me, and whatever careful blankness I had built into my face for three years, it did not matter, because the way he looked at me told me everything.

He knew something was not right.

He turned and kept walking, disappearing around the bend in the stairwell without another word, and I stood there with my spray bottle still in my hand, shaking, because for the first time in three years, someone had looked straight through the name I had built myself and seen the girl underneath it.

I did not know his name yet, but I would learn it by the end of the day, the way you learn the name of a storm after it has already torn your roof apart.

Priya was waiting for me by the supply closet when I finally made it back down. "You're white as a sheet. What happened up there."

"Nothing happened." I busied myself restocking my cart so I would not have to look at her while I said it.

"Mara. You're shaking."

I looked down. She was right. My hands would not stay still, no matter how hard I pressed them flat against the cart handle. "I ran into someone on the stairs," I said. "That's all."

"Someone, or someone." She smiles

I did not answer her. I could not, not without giving away how badly my whole careful life had just tilted on its foundation. I finished my shift in a fog, mopping floors I would not remember mopping, and the entire time one thought sat lodged behind my ribs like a splinter I could not work loose.

He knew my face, and not my name, well not yet, but my face, and in my experience, a face was always the first thing men like that remembered before the rest came flooding back.