Page 31 of Mister St. James

I want to protect her. But I don’t even know where the threat is coming from.

I want to wake her, confess everything, plot a counterattack. But I don’t. Not yet.

Instead, I set the phone on the nightstand and crawl back into bed, wrapping myself around her like armor, like a prayer.

She stirs, sighs, and melts into me, never waking.

I lie awake until dawn, counting her breaths and waiting for the next move.

Chapter fifteen

Walls Up

Catalina

I always know when something’s off. It’s the first thing they teach you at the Vaquer dinner table, how to clock a mood, how to hear an argument three rooms away by the way a fork hits the ceramic, how to predict the next two days based on the sound of a door closing. It’s why, when I step out of the elevator and hit the glass half-mile that is Precision’s executive corridor, I know, before I even see him, that Aiden is not himself.

By Wednesday, the wrongness has spread to the air itself. Precision Dynamics is engineered to suffocate error, every surface immaculate, every light tuned for maximum dopamine drip, but even the recycled air tastes a degree off this week. I’m at my desk at 7:51, hair scraped into a bun, skirt pressed, blazer sharp. I don’t need the armor, but sometimes you wear it for the other guy’s benefit. I type a quick status update for Aiden and slide the portfolio under his door, because the usual open invitation is gone.

At 8:02, he calls: “Ms. Vaquer?”

I answer before the second ring. “Yes, Aiden.”

He doesn’t look up when I enter. He slides the marked-up contract across the desk, left hand steady, right knuckle tapping a metronome on the mouse pad. His eyes are on the LCD, the blue of the screen making him look half a shade paler.

“Edits are done,” he says. “Thank you.” He says it into the space next to my left shoulder, not to me. Four nights ago he had his mouth against that same shoulder, biting hard enough that I wore a bruise to a breakfast meeting. Now I might as well be air.

The “thank you” is meant to be a period, but I don’t move. “Should I book Zurich for next week?”

He gives the smallest shake of his head, still not looking. “No travel for me. I’ll brief remotely.”

I wait for a question, a joke, anything. All I get is a silence so dense it could compress into a diamond if I stood here long enough. I pick up the folder and leave, closing the door with the softest possible click.

The next day, I go to his office at 8:30 with the weekly compliance report. I knock twice, like always.

Instead of, “Come in,” I get, “Leave it on the desk, please.” The voice is flat, perfect.

I push the door open two inches, enough to see his shoulders hunched forward, both hands white-knuckled on the armrests.

At 10:00, I ping him with the daily summary. He responds in single syllables, barely even verbs:

“Noted.”

“Received.”

“Confirm.”

I try to sneak in a joke: “If I don’t hear from you in 30 minutes, I’ll assume you’ve been abducted by the Swiss again. Should I ransom you, or let them keep you?”

His reply: “Busy. Please handle Zurich as discussed.”

I type out three different snarky responses, then delete them all. I want to throw my phone through the window, but settle for slamming it face-down on my desk.

The thing is, I don’t do this. I have a whole system: keep it fun, keep it light, keep one foot already out. It’s served me fine all these years. So I don’t know what to call the feeling currently eating through my sternum like a slow acid, except wrong. Wrong and inconvenient and not something I agreed to.

11:00 I’m in his office, stack of folders in my arms that are there primarily just for show.

“Am I booking you a car to meet with Soto next Wednesday?” I ask, stepping into the office farther until I’m right in front of his desk and impossible to ignore.