Chapter 3 Monday

Rain

I'd been awake since three, and not because of my alarm, which wasn't set for another hour. My brain had decided the best use of the dark was to rehearse every possible way I could screw up my first day at Cage Global.

By four-thirty I gave up on sleep and ironed my blazer. Three times. I burned my thumb on the second pass and swore under my breath, then held it under the kitchen tap, almost grateful for the excuse. If my hands were going to shake all day, at least now I had a reason.

I locked up my room in Wakefield at a quarter to five, when the whole street was still dark and the only thing awake was a delivery truck idling outside the bodega. The bus took twenty minutes to show up, it dropped me at the train, and from there it was another fifty minutes of the 2 rumbling toward Midtown while the city slowly woke up around me. Somewhere around the third stop I fell asleep standing up with my cheek against a cold pole, and I jerked awake with my heart slamming, sure I'd missed my stop. Nobody looked at me. Honestly, that was the nicest thing that happened to me before six in the morning.

I bought a coffee from a cart outside Cage Global. Three dollars I didn't have, for a drink I didn't even like, but walking into a sixty-story building with empty hands felt like showing up to a party without a gift. I needed something to hold on to.

The lobby was freezing and so quiet I could hear my shoes squeak against the marble. The security guard looked at the badge clipped to my blazer, then at my face, then back at the badge, like he was waiting for the picture to change into somebody more impressive.

"Sixtieth floor," he said. "You're early."

"I like being early." I smiled, hoping it looked more confident than it felt. It didn't. My stomach was doing somersaults, and I was pretty sure he could tell.

"Good luck, kid." One corner of his mouth twitched. "Mr. Cage doesn't do second chances."

"I'm not a kid. I'm his assistant." My voice cracked on the last word, and I wanted to crawl under the desk.

"Even better," he said, waving me toward the elevators. "Longer chew time."

I laughed, which surprised me, and then I stepped into the elevator and watched the numbers climb, and the laugh died somewhere around floor twenty. By forty, my palms were so sweaty the coffee cup was sliding in my grip. By fifty, I was whispering to myself like a crazy person.

You can do this. You've survived worse than a man in a suit.

It didn't help. Not even a little. But when the doors slid open on sixty, I lifted my chin and walked out anyway, because that was the only thing I had ever known how to do.

A woman with silver hair pulled back in a tight knot sat at the desk outside his office, a phone wedged against her shoulder and three folders open in front of her. She looked me over in one quick sweep, the way you'd look at a package you were pretty sure was going to be returned.

"You're Smith." She hung up the phone. "He's in at six-thirty. Don't speak unless he speaks first. Black coffee, no sugar, on his desk before he sits. If he asks for something, it's already late."

"Got it." My voice came out so small I almost apologized for it.

She studied me a second longer than she needed to, and something in her face loosened, just a little. "Kitchen's down the hall. There's tea in the second cupboard. Nobody counts it."

I don't know why that nearly made me cry. Maybe because it was such a tiny, ordinary kindness, and I wasn't used to those. I nodded, swallowed the lump in my throat, and went to make his coffee.

I made it twice. The first cup went cold while I stood outside his door, arguing with myself about whether it was too early to knock, my knuckles an inch from the wood and my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I couldn't stand the thought of him tasting it lukewarm on my very first morning. So I dumped it down the sink and started over.

At six-thirty his private elevator dinged. I jumped up so fast my chair slammed into the wall.

Knight Cage walked past my desk without turning his head.

He was taller than I remembered. Maybe it was just that I'd been sitting during the interview, small in a leather chair that was way too big for me. He didn't look at me, and he didn't look at the coffee, and I stood there with my hands clasped so tightly my nails left little crescents in my palms.

"Miss Smith."

I was in his office before he finished saying my name.

"My nine o'clock is moving to ten. The ten is moving to eleven. Call Holloway and tell him nothing about why." He didn't look up from the folder. "Then pull the Brennan file and have a summary on my desk by noon. Not a copy. A summary."

"Yes, sir."

"Questions?"

I had six. I had twelve. I had a whole list in my head, rehearsed on the bus in the smallest, neatest voice I had.

"No, sir."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth, too quick to name. Then he turned a page. "Go."

I didn't breathe properly until the door shut behind me.

I read the Brennan file standing up in the supply room, because every chair in the open area looked like it belonged to somebody important. Four hundred pages is a long time to stand and hold yourself together. Somewhere around page two hundred my stomach growled so loudly in that silent little room that it could have qualified as a threat. I pressed my hand flat against it and held my breath like it was a person I could shush.

I'd skipped breakfast. I always skipped breakfast. It was easier to stop wanting food than to keep counting what it cost.

I wrote the summary out by hand first, in my neatest writing. Then I typed it. Then I deleted every sentence that wasn't pulling its weight, until it was so clean and careful it didn't even sound like me. I told myself that was the point.

At eleven-fifty I carried it in. He read it without a word while I watched his eyes move down the page and didn't dare look at anything else, not the window, not the skyline, not the single framed photograph on his credenza that had been turned just slightly away from the room.

He reached the bottom and set the page down.

"There's an error in the third paragraph."

My whole body went cold. My ears filled with a thin, high ringing, and underneath it, in the voice I had never managed to leave behind, I heard my mother say useless.

"I'm so sorry, sir, I'll fix it right now, I-"

"The figure is correct," he said. "The date isn't. It was March, not May."

I took the page back with hands that were almost steady and checked it against the file. He was right. March. I'd been so scared of the big things that I'd fumbled a small one.

"I'll correct it now."

"Do." And then, as my hand touched the door, without lifting his eyes: "Noon, Miss Smith."

I stopped. "Sir?"

"You'll take lunch at noon. Every day. Away from your desk." The pen in his hand never paused. "I don't keep staff who faint."

I stood there with the page crumpling in my fist.

Nobody had ever told me to eat. Not my mother, who'd looked straight through me across the dinner table for ten years like I was a window. Not the boarding school, where I'd eaten alone by the glass because the cafeteria noise made my chest hurt. Not one single person in my whole life had said eat like it mattered whether I did.

And he'd said it like an order. A flat, cold order he hadn't even bothered to look up for.

My throat closed so fast I had to stare at the carpet.

"Yes, sir," I managed. "Thank you."

He didn't answer. I hadn't expected him to.

I sat on the stone ledge outside the building with a two-dollar bagel in my lap and the whole city roaring below me, and I couldn't swallow the first bite. My eyes burned. Then I laughed, a wet, ridiculous sound, because here I was, a grown woman with a perfect GPA, crying into bread on a Monday afternoon over six words from a man who hadn't smiled at me once.

I don't keep staff who faint.

Maybe that was just who he was. Maybe he was cold all the way down, and it meant nothing. But I turned that sentence over and over in my head like a coin I'd found on the sidewalk, and it didn't feel like nothing. It felt like somebody had finally noticed there was a me to feed.

I ate every crumb.