THE SECOND JOB

ELENAThe apartment was on the fourteenth floor and it had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the kind of Manhattan skyline that made people forget they were paying three million dollars for eight hundred square feet.I had forgotten that I was good at this.Not the real estate specifically, I had only been doing this for three weeks and Jeremy had been kind enough not to mention how many times I'd mispronounced escrow in my first week. But this, standing in a room with a stranger and making them feel something, reading what a person wanted before they said it out loud, I had always been good at this. Seven years in a place that stripped everything down to survival had made me forget that I had ever been a person with skills."The kitchen was renovated last year," I told the client, a woman named Patricia who wore the kind of quiet jewelry that cost more than my entire wardrobe. "European appliances, heated floors, the pantry alone is larger than most studio apartments i

THE FILE

ATLAS"Tell me you are not sitting in the dark staring at a folder like some kind of unhinged villain," Keelan said from the doorway.I was sitting in the dark staring at a folder."Close the door," I told him.He crossed the office, pulled the chair across from my desk without being invited and dropped into it with the ease of a man who had long stopped asking for permission in my spaces. He looked at the folder on my desk, then at me, then back at the folder."Is that the file your father gave you?""Yes.""And you are only opening it now?"I pushed it across the desk toward him without answering. He picked it up, opened the first page and read in silence for a while, his expression going from curious to still in the way that Keelan's expressions moved when something genuinely surprised him, which was rare enough that I watched it happen.He set the folder down. "Atlas.""I know.""This is not just Luke," he said, pressing two fingers against the page, "your father's legal team is i

IN LOVE

ELENA"I need you to trust me for sixty more days," he had said, standing in my doorway like the request was reasonable, like sixty days was a small and manageable thing to hand a person who had already handed him everything she had. I had shut the door in his face and gone back to my cold rice and told myself I felt nothing and then stared at my bedroom ceiling until two in the morning feeling absolutely everything.I wore the green wrap dress to Atlas Holdings the next morning, the one Emily had lent me three weeks ago that I kept forgetting to return, dark forest green with a thin gold belt that I had found at the bottom of my wardrobe from a life that felt like it had belonged to someone else. I paired it with the black heels I had bought from a sale rack on 34th Street, the ones with the small scuff on the left toe that I had colored over with a black marker because I was a woman with dignity and limited options. I looked good and I knew it, which was its own small act of warf

THE MOVE

LUKEI have always believed that the difference between a powerful man and a merely rich one is that a powerful man never needs to raise his voice, and Gerald Voss was the kind of man who understood that without being told.Which was exactly why I had chosen the Meridian Club for this particular conversation, because the Meridian Club was the kind of place where everything said within its walls stayed there, not out of honour, but out of mutual self-interest, which was a far more reliable guarantee.Gerald was already at the table when I arrived, a glass of aged scotch in front of him and a face that gave nothing away. Most men in his position performed neutrality. Gerald simply had it, the way some people are born with good bone structure, it required no maintenance.I settled into the chair across from him, signalled the waiter with two fingers and waited until my own glass arrived before I said anything."You spoke to Atlas," I said."I did," Gerald confirmed."And?"Gerald turned

Falling in love with the Devil’s son のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 61 - チャプター 64

THE SECOND JOB

THE FILE

IN LOVE

THE MOVE