Dima lifts his glass. “You’re a disaster.”
Seb scoffs, appalled at my plan, whereas Dima looks proud. Darkness cut from the same cloth. We own souls, we don’t ask.
I lift my glass too and we toast.
“To inevitability,” I say as Seb mumbles in horror. Hypocrite.
CHAPTER 8 - LEO
The mail room is loud in the way a bar is loud, busy, people shouting over each other. Carts rattle over tile. Packages thump into bins. Someone’s radio murmurs through a layer of static. Danny is arguing with the printer like it owes him money.
It should feel grounding. It doesn’t.
Ever since the corridor incident, I’ve been walking around with the uneasy sense that I’m standing on a mark that only I can’t see. Like a spotlight has been bolted to the ceiling somewhere above my head, waiting to flick on. To place me back into an awkward position and to have the full focus of the one man you want to avoid if you want to keep your job. I’ve been selected as the prime idiot of the hotel.
And here I am, back in the very same corridor, grabbing the correct stack from my pile to hand to one of the office staff when that awful feeling of ‘something badis about to happen’ overflows me. That incident with Ethan has given me anxiety when delivering mail.
As I move closer to the girls to hand over the mail, this feeling intensifies. It’s that sensation you get when you sense someone is watching you from behind. I slowly turn to see where Ethan stands ten feet away, just outside of his office, as if he’s always been there and I’m the one who wandered into his orbit. The hallway is consumed by him, I’ve seriously never met a more commanding person in my life.
I want to fidget with how he is staring at me in a way I can’t decipher between irritance, or that he wants to erase me from this planet. My stomach drops into my shoes as he just stands there. What am I supposed to do? Does he want me to speak? Oh, fuck it. This is awkward enough as it is.
“Mr. Taylor,” I say in greeting.
He doesn’t answer. Weird. He just studies me, but not rudely, just with eerie focus as if he can read my thoughts. This guy is so fucking odd. The longer he watches me, the more freaked out I get, and before I know it, I take a step back.
To my horror, he takes one step forward, and before I know it the distance between us collapses into something uncomfortably intimate and wrong. What the hell is going on with this guy? Every time I see him he becomes more…engrossed. Maybe even infatuated? I don’t know what the right word is but it’s not normal.
“You’re carrying the wrong tray,” he says, his eyesunblinking, waiting for a response. This is like being in an alternate universe.
I glance down, confused by his comment. “I…this is for the executive offices.”
“Yes.”
“That’s where I was heading.”
“Not today.”
My pulse jumps. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re assigned to hotel services deliveries today,” he continues. “Danny made the change.”
Danny did not make the change. Or did he and I wasn’t listening? But I nod anyway, because his voice doesn’t leave room for arguments. It doesn’t rise or fall. It simply exists, solid and unyielding.
“I’ll take it,” he says.
Before I can respond, he lifts the tray from my hands where his fingers brush mine. It’s brief and clinical, but I don’t miss the line of heat that runs up my arm. What is he doing, taking the tray?
“Follow me,” he says.
My heart stumbles. Why does he want me to follow him? Oh shit, is he gonna fire me?
“Sir —” I start, but he raises his hand.
“Don’t call me that. It’s Ethan.”
He turns toward his office and I follow because my body doesn’t remember how to refuse an order. What the hell is going on? And why would the owner of this hotel chain want to talk to the mailroom boy?
Inside his office the space is massive,sterile and expensive. Glass walls. Black furniture. A desk that looks more like a command center than a place to write emails.
