I reached for my phone and my bag.
“I’m not feeling great,” I said, standing.
Francis looked up mid-sentence. Her eyes moved across my face with the focused attention of someone doing a rapid assessment.
“Your face is all flushed.” Genuine concern.“Maybe you’re coming down with something?”
She raised both index fingers and crossed them at me.
I gave her the finger and turned to leave.
“Feel better soon,” she called after me, with the special warmth of someone who cared enough to be concerned while wanting me to keep my potential disease to myself.
“Doesn’t she need to let someone know she’s leaving?” Carla’s voice, behind me.
“They’re all in a meeting.” Francis. The bite in it unmistakable even through the closing doors.“What’s she supposed to do?”
The secure doors swung shut.
The floor noise dropped away.
And the heat arrived properly—not the background warmth of the past weeks but something fuller, a fever that joined the cramping and made the corridor feel too bright and slightly unreal. I pressed the lift button and stood very still and breathed through it.
You know what’s happening, Bad Girl said. Not unkindly. Just a fact. You’re going to the solution.
I knew.
She knew.
Somewhere on an executive floor above me, Conrí and Kael knew too—or would, the moment the lift doors opened. I had no plan beyond the next floor. No words prepared. No professional framing for what I was about to do.
Somewhere between the park runs and the shared meals and the walks through places that had been standing longer than either of our bloodlines, this had been building. Quietly. Inevitably. With the patient momentum of something that had never needed our permission.
The lift arrived.
I stepped inside.
The doors closed on a Wednesday that had just stopped being ordinary.
??????
His floor was well-lit.
More windows. More sunlight. More space. Better artwork on the walls—actual art, not the motivational print someone had ordered in bulk for the lower floors.
It irritated me.
All of it irritated me. The light was too bright. The air conditioning too present. The carpet too clean and too quiet and too far from the only scent that was going to make any of this bearable.
I sniffed.
Closed my eyes.
My lungs couldn’t get enough of it. Traces of him—threaded through the ventilation, caught in the fabric of the chairs, layered into the very air of the floor he occupied every day. Rich and warm and completely unavoidable.
Addictive was the only word.
Was this what substance abuse felt like? The specific, narrowing logic of just one more. Just one more breath. One more hit. One more second of this before I have to function like a normal person again.
