He moved behind her chair before she could answer. Her skin prickled as he leaned over her shoulder, close enough that she caught his scent: cedar and smoke and something underneath that might have been char. Like a fire that had been burning for a very long time.
His finger traced the symbols without touching the paper. “Cuneiform. This character is the determinant for ‘binding.’ The entire section refers to ninth-generation inheritance clauses.”
“Ninth generation?” She turned to look at him.
Mistake.
His eyes were darker than she’d remembered. Gold flecks caught the overhead light, and this close, she could see they weren’t flecks at all. More like something burning very far away. Stars, maybe. Or something older than stars.
She forgot what they’d been discussing. Forgot the Henderson merger. Forgot everything except the impossible depth of those eyes and the heat radiating from his proximity.
“That can’t be legally enforceable,” she managed. Her voice came out rougher than she intended.
“In regular courts? No.” He straightened, putting professional distance between them. The air felt colder without him there. “But the Henderson contracts weren’t written for regular courts.”
He was already walking toward the elevator.
“Come with me.”
“Where?” She glanced at her laptop, at the mess of documents, at the window where Manhattan continued itsFriday night without her. “It’s almost ten. Won’t the archives be closed?”
“The real archives never close.” He didn’t turn around. “Are you coming, Ms. Feng? Or would you prefer to spend another three hours misreading Cuneiform?”
Pride stung. She grabbed her legal pad and followed.
The elevator was waiting.Doors open, like it had known.
Victor pressed B3. The button glowed red instead of white.
“I thought archives were on B1.”
“Public archives are on B1. Corporate precedents, standard contracts, anything from the last fifty years.” The elevator descended past the lobby. Past B1. Past B2. “The real archives require clearance.”
“And I have clearance?”
“You do now.”
The doors opened onto a corridor no architect had ever planned.
Gas lamps. Actual gas lamps, with flames flickering behind glass globes. The walls were stone, old stone, the kind that predated Manhattan itself. The air smelled different down here, older, mustier, like opening a book that had been sealed for centuries.
“This can’t be part of the original building.”
“Can’t it?” Victor led her past heavy wooden doors marked with symbols that glowed faintly as they passed. “The firm has been here since 1630. New Amsterdam’s records are remarkably incomplete about our original holdings.”
“The oldest building in Manhattan is from the 1650s.”
“The oldest building humans acknowledge.”
They reached a door marked only with a brass nameplate:Restricted Holdings. Victor pressed his palm against the wood.
The door swung open without a sound.
The room beyond didn’t make sense.
It stretched in directions rooms weren’t supposed to stretch, corners that seemed to fold back on themselves, distances that changed depending on how she looked at them. Shelves climbed toward a ceiling lost in shadow, or maybe there was no ceiling at all, just darkness that went up forever. Books floated between sections, reorganizing themselves with the soft whisper of turning pages. A ladder climbed itself along one wall, searching for something. In the center, a reading podium stood surrounded by chairs that adjusted their positions as she watched.
Ava’s knees locked. Her stomach dropped. The pendant hummed against her collarbone, a vibration she felt in her teeth, and she had to grab the doorframe to keep from falling.
