Her space is small. Depressing, really, in the way all cubicles are depressing. But she’s made it bearable with small touches.
A photo of her and her friend Yasmin laughing at some restaurant, both of them mid-bite of something that’s dripping sauce. A sticky note on her monitor that says “You can dohard things.”The Garfield mug I’ve seen her drink from every morning.
I find myself looking through the files on her desk. Not snooping, exactly. Just… understanding. Trying to see the world from her perspective, from this cramped little space where she spends seventy hours a week making my vision into reality.
At the bottom of the stack of papers is a small spiral notepad, the kind you’d use for grocery lists or phone messages. But this isn’t mundane. At the top, in her handwriting, it says “90 DAYS” and beneath it is a list:
- See the sunrise from the lakefront
- Watch Casablanca (and actually pay attention this time)
- Visit the Art Institute before I can’t see the paintings anymore
- Remember what Mom looked like when she smiled
- See the city lights from somewhere high up
- Stand in the rain and feel it on my face
Each item is a small dream. Achingly simple, unbearably urgent. Things most people take for granted, experiences that cost nothing but mean everything when you’re counting down to darkness.
I drop down in her chair without thinking. From here, I can see directly into my office window. This is what she looks at every day. This is her view: my light burning late into the night, my silhouette moving behind glass.
I recognize this feeling. It’s the same protective instinct I have for Sage—that bone-deep need to shield someone from harm, to carry their burdens, to make their world safer. But with Eliana, it’s also something more. Something I’ve been refusing to name because naming it makes it real, and real things can hurt you.
Then the fear crashes in, cold and familiar.
My track record with people I try to protect is shit.
Sage, paralyzed because I was driving too fast and too cocky.
My mother, dead giving birth to a baby she couldn’t afford, while I was at culinary school, too focused on my own future to check on hers.
Even Aleksei himself—he became a monster partially because I couldn’t save him from that life. I wasn’t enough.
Everyone I love, everyone I try to protect, ends up broken.
What if caring about Eliana puts her at risk? What if my darkness ruins her the way it ruins everything else?
She’s already losing her sight. She already has a mother who bleeds her dry emotionally and financially.
She doesn’t need the additional burden of Bastian Hale’s damage.
The decision takes shape: I’ll keep my distance. Professional, cordial, nothing more. I’ll ensure she gets everything the contract promises. Health care, money, freedom.
And then, in eighty-six days, she’ll be free.
Free of Hale Hospitality.
Free of Project Olympus.
Free of me.
It’s safer this way. For all of us.
I stand, straightening her desk, making sure everything is exactly as she left it. The files go back in their precise positions. The pens line up just so. I turn off her lamp, plunging the cubicle into darkness.
But as I’m leaving, my hand moves of its own accord.
