Rain needles my cheeks the second the car door opens. The iodine sting rides the wind from the harbor, and the Vance Spire breathes green light through its living facade like a patient under a sleep mask. Drone rotors thrum high and quick above the storm-glass, cicada-busy and nosy. I shake water from my cuffs, check the lanyard, and step inside.
The lobby hums with money trying to sound gentle—basalt floors, panels of algae-lit glass that register stress and glow calmer when people breathe. My pulse draws a thin smear of turquoise across the nearest wall. I steady the rhythm, feel the beat settle. The receptionist doesn’t look up. The elevator does.
The metal doors close around me, and the cabin inhales. Air tastes filtered—ozone, mint, an after-scent of lemon my mother used when she wanted the house to pretend it wasn’t listing in a storm. The scanner sweeps my face, drifts to the badge in my palm, and blares a discreet tone. Not the public honk that shames, just a private flicker: the red eye knows I am not the name I carry.
“Reset,” I tell it, low. I slide a decoy credential across the reader—the one keyed to a vendor audit that expired last week but still drifts in the system like a dead fish. “I’m here for Elias Vance. Contract consult.”
The elevator whispers, “Vendor authorization lapsed.”
I give it a smile I learned on the piers, the one that says you can make this hard or you can make this quick and we’ll both stay dry. “Then call upstairs. I’ll time the hold music.”
The cab’s mic clicks. Rain hammers the glass shaft. I review the reflection: low ponytail, jacket patched at the elbow with neat stitches, boots that don’t squeak. The call returns with a ping and an open door to the executive level. The machine apologizes in soft corporate, and I accept.
The executive floor smells like citrus and static. Quiet money leaves tracks—soundproof carpets, white orchids aiming soft fists at the light, glass that lets the storm in but keeps everything else outside. A group of assistants floats by, their tablets tucked like trays. I clock exits: main stair, service corridor, a door etched “Maintenance” that sits too proud on the jamb—new hardware. A good place to vanish or enter, depending on the day.
He waits near the tide clock. It ticks three minutes fast; of course it does. Everyone plans; no one’s ready.
“Ms. Quinn?” he says, pronouncing the name on the credential I showed downstairs.
“Quill,” I correct, and hold his eyes so he knows I choose the version that matters.
Elias Vance carries exhaustion like a well-cut coat. His suit is tailored, his tie misaligned by a thumb-width, hair damp from a run between cars. He reads as engineer pretending to be prince: shoulders slightly forward, hands with small nicks near the knuckles, a trickle of rainwater marking a faint diagonal on his lapel.
“You got past the elevator,” he says. “That usually weeds out the storytellers.”
“I like to earn my storm,” I say. “You’ve got fifteen minutes if you want the good version. Ten if you want the truth.”
The corner of his mouth shifts. “Let’s trade both.”
He leads me into a conference room skinning over with green light, algae panels pulsing to a heartbeat I refuse to call mine. The table is a slab of tempered glass with a steel vein, and in the center sits a shallow dish of cufflinks, each glossy as a beetle. I catalogue the weights, the shapes, the style—classic with tiny vanities: mother-of-pearl, brushed titanium, a pair set with a line of algae glass the color of cheap gin.
“You know why you’re here,” he says. He stays standing, fingers pressed to the back of a chair, knuckles pale. He wants to anchor. He wants control he doesn’t have.
“Anonymous threats escalated after you refused to license your neural mods to defense,” I say. “Accidents near the loading bay. Wrong-way driver on Wayfinder Avenue last month. The fire suppression test that triggered in only your lab corridor. You rotated shifts. Threats adapted. That’s the outline.”
His gaze clicks sharper. “Good outline. Missing one thing.”
“The person who noticed the pattern first isn’t on payroll anymore,” I say, and the words sand my throat. “Lila Quill temped two floors below you.”
His fingers lift from the chair. The algae wall answers his spike with a deeper green. “I remember her. Smart. She liked the elevator music.”
I keep my face still. “She vanished.”
“I know,” he says. The voice comes thinner. “That part isn’t in your résumé.”
“It’s in my price,” I say. “You still want to hire me?”
He sits. I don’t. He studies my hands—the tendons, the half moons where old rope burned and left pale signatures. “Bodyguards tend to look heavier,” he says.
“Heavy slows,” I say. “Heavy assumes blunt force works in a city that worships NDAs. You need someone who can blend into the background your board thinks is safe.”
“Which background is that?”
“Dates. Charity things. Places where rich people do kindness at each other and call it resilience. You’re about to host a festival for the seawall repairs, right? The one with the lantern boats and kids singing on the arches, under the cameras that take naps.”
He huffs a laugh with no joy in it. “You did your homework.”
“I live here. We all pay the same tide.”
He drums the table once. “I’m not a fan of bodyguards who turn their clients into theater.”
“Then flip the theater,” I say. “You don’t hire a guard. You hire a companion. The feeds call her your new distraction. She stands close in photos. She knows which cameras are good for skin and bad for angle. She kisses you when a drone drifts too near to your ID hand. That’s the cover.”
He doesn’t blink for three beats. The storm rattles the glass. The algae wall calms on its own like a friend pretending not to eavesdrop. “A fake romance,” he says, like the words are a sour lozenge.
“A temporary story that protects you,” I say. “And gives me proximity.”
“To me,” he says. “Or to the floors where your sister worked?”
I let silence settle, then put it where it belongs. “Both.”
He stands again and circles the table, slow, measuring distance the way I do when a stairwell door doesn’t sit right. When he reaches the dish of cufflinks, he trails a finger through them. A soft clink, a metallic chime against the glass. I let my right hand drift into my jacket pocket and index the tiny capsule stuck to the inside seam—my first gift to the Spire. Field-tested. Battery good for forty hours. Micro-lens is a dot of shadow nobody will notice unless they’re hunting ghosts.
“Your reputation says you work alone,” he says.
“I don’t let anyone near my clients,” I say. “But I listen to one friend on comms who knows how to make an elevator apologize.”
“Any romance rules?” He says it lightly, but the question has teeth.
“Yes,” I say. “We set safe words. Blue means pause. Black means stop everything, even with cameras watching. You don’t owe me touch. I don’t owe you more than the contract. We control the story. We don’t let the story control us.”
“And if the story asks for a kiss?”
I step closer, not close enough to read pores, close enough to smell the rain on his collar, the clean of hotel soap, the electric hint of machine rooms in the vents. “Then the kiss is a tool,” I say. “You’ll know when it happens because I’ll look at your left shoulder first. That means a drone is to your nine. Right shoulder means human eyes to your three. If I can’t speak, I touch your wrist twice. We move into the blind of a pillar, or the blind of a mouth.”
His breath hitches. He doesn’t step back.
“You’ve done this before,” he says.
“I’ve done what needed doing,” I say. “And I don’t break clients.”
“I’m not worried about breaking,” he says, and the raw honesty in it surprises me. “I’m worried about being used to break someone else.”
“Then help me not do that,” I say. “Help me not fail.”
The wind outside shifts pitch. Somewhere above us a drone hauls itself out of the weather gap and whirs along the glass. The algae wall ripples. He touches the cufflinks again and I let my hand leave my pocket.
“Pick one,” he says. “Everyone in this building gets a pair.”
“I like the green line,” I say, pointing to the algae-inlaid set. “On-brand.”
“On-brand,” he repeats, dry. He pushes the dish closer. “Take them. The board likes us tidy.”
The capsule rests on my thumbnail. I cough into my wrist, cover my mouth, and let the pellet stick to my skin with the tiny cling of static. My other hand lifts the cufflink pair. I palm one, feel the oval, press the pellet to the back, and rub until the heat of my skin wakes the adhesive. I angle the link so the camera faces the table’s longest axis. From this seat, it will catch faces that lean in, fingers that betray tells, the little twitches leaders hide.
“Tell me what you’re loyal to, Ms. Quill,” he says.
“Contracts. Evidence. Family,” I say, giving him the order in the shape that lets him think he can move it. “Loyalty can be a leash. I’ve learned to clip it to something that doesn’t drag me into water.”
“Specific family,” he says.
“My sister,” I say, clean. “Lila worked two floors below your lab. You already knew.”
His eyes move, not away, but in, to a map I can’t see. “I knew her voice,” he says. “Elevators and hallways. She asked good questions when she didn’t have the clearance to. I told her to get it.”
“She tried,” I say. “Someone decided she shouldn’t.”
He looks at the tide clock, then at the rain moving sideways beyond the glass. “I need this company to grow a spine,” he says. “And I need to live through the next quarter to make that happen.”
“Your board wants to rent your spine to a defense contractor,” I say. “You said no. They’re doing what people do when money hears no.”
“They send accidents,” he says, grim.
I let that sit between us. Above the glass, rotors buzz again. A tremor runs through the floor I pretend doesn’t happen.
“All right,” he says. He reaches for a tablet, keys in a code, and the contract blooms on the table, text rising under the glass like lit reeds. “Term: six months, with renewals. Stipend, hazard bonus, standard NDA.”
I scan. The NDA reads like a choke. I slide my finger to one paragraph. “We strike this line,” I say. “‘No public statements regarding client behavior.’ If the client harms someone, I don’t keep the harm cozy.”
He studies me. “And if the harm is the system, not the client?”
“Then we name the system,” I say. “And we bring proof enough to make the feeds choke on it.”
A breath I didn’t know I was holding—no, I knew it; I counted to four and releases like that don’t fool anyone—drops out of my chest. He types. The line disappears.
“You look at the cameras like they’re patients,” he says, not signing yet. “You can tell where they hurt.”
“Cameras don’t hurt,” I say. “People do.”
He touches the stylus to the signature field, pauses. “One more thing. The cover. If we do this, we do it for real in public: photos, dinners, the resilience festival after the storm. Harbor Eleven likes to clap for its survivors.”
“I know those nights,” I say. Lanterns, civic pride, the salt-wet arches where couples tuck themselves into shadows the CCTV can’t see. “We’ll navigate the arches.”
“And the clubs,” he says. “Palmetto House requires phones sleep at the door. We will be touched, watched, baited.”
“Then we wear a story that bites back,” I say. “I’ll run the choreography. You follow; when you can’t, you tell me. No bravado.”
His jaw resets, that tiny knock of teeth people do when they decide against pride. He signs. The stylus’s scratch is surprisingly loud under the storm.
“Welcome to the worst idea of my year,” he says, but a ghost of relief loosens his shoulders.
I slip the cufflinks into my pocket and let one remain on the table, facing the door. “Good,” I say. “Terrible ideas are the ones that save your life.”
“We start tonight,” he says. “Dinner. Your call on venue. I hear Dockyard K has a pop-up with fried oysters and a violinist who plays synth covers.”
“Dock workers barter favors while elites sign napkins,” I say. “That’s a lot of eyes. We’ll pick a place with mirrors I can read. And I’ll sweep your apartment first.”
“My apartment is secure,” he says.
I glance at the algae wall. The green wobbles at the word secure. “It will be,” I say. “After me.”
He reaches for his jacket. The cufflink dish sings again. I map the room while he moves: two exits, main and service; a security lens in the soffit pretending to be ambient light; a maintenance door with the proud hinge; an unmarked panel in the corner that hums too warm—server closet. I note the under-desk footrest, the chair casters that roll unevenly, the faint draft at the baseboard that means a hidden vent someone might crawl through if they hated their knees.
“Safe words,” he says, shrugging into the jacket. “Blue and black?”
“Blue pauses,” I say. “Black stops.”
“What stops you?” He asks it without flourish. Not curiosity for curiosity’s sake. A necessary inventory.
“Children,” I say. “Flood water. And people using kindness as a knife.”
“That last one covers half my contacts,” he says.
“Then you get a smaller guest list.”
We step back into the outer hall where the storm throws its shoulder at the glass. The algae breathes. The tide clock insists the world is three minutes closer to whatever comes next than either of us believes. He taps the elevator button. I let my knuckles graze the cufflink now in his sleeve—quick, incidental, nothing that reads as intimacy to anyone except the lens buried in the hardware. The microcamera wakes and starts drinking the room.
“One more rule,” I say while we wait. “If I say down, you don’t argue.”
He nods. “If I say run?”
“I keep up,” I say. “Or I drag you.”
The doors sigh open, and the air inside is colder, brushed with that mint-ozone again. He steps in, then pauses, eyes narrowing at the glass behind me. I hear it too: a mosquito whine tucked into the rain’s roar, extra-thready, needle-fine. Drone rotors near the storm-glass, hovering for a look.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. No ringtone; just the haptic I assign to messages from numbers that don’t repeat. I slide the screen up with my thumb, tilt it so only I can read.
tonight. bring her. A low-res heart emoji pulses under the words, sweet and wrong.
I tuck the phone away. “We’ll make dinner quick,” I say, stepping into the cab with him. “Your apartment first.”
The elevator doors begin to close. The drone’s whine peaks, right outside the seam of glass. I raise my eyes to his and nod once toward his left shoulder. He blinks in acknowledgment, a tiny yes.
“Blue,” he says, testing the word in a voice that doesn’t carry.
“Not yet,” I say, and watch the numbers descend, counting the beats until we hit the lobby and the storm opens its mouth for us.