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“I could. I’m not going to.” She had her hand on the door. “I have a very large, very expensive atrium that doesn’t care about my morning, and the work is the one thing that’s never let me down when everything else did. I’m not starting a new tradition today.”
“I expected that answer.”
“Then why offer?”
“Because you deserved the offer, even knowing full well in advance you’d refuse it.” He said it simply, without performance, and for once she came up empty on a comeback.
“You’re going to keep doing that, aren’t you? The offering-things-you-already-know-I’ll-refuse thing.”
“Probably. It’s a pattern I’ve apparently developed.” He glanced at her sideways, amusement crossing his face before he could stop it. “You could stop refusing occasionally. Just to see what happens.”
“I’ll take it under advisement.”
“That’s what you said about the security detail conversation too.”
“And look how well that turned out for both of us, all things considered.”
He reached across the console before she could open the door, drew her back toward him, and kissed her again, slower than the one at the penthouse door, no audience left to perform for and no reason to hurry. She was faintly out of breath by the time he let her go.
“That’s what turned out well.”
“Insufferable.”
“Entirely.” No shame anywhere in his voice, none at all. “Go build your atrium. I’ll see you tonight.”
She climbed out, and didn’t look back until she’d reached the door, and told herself the not-looking was a coincidence, and knew, even as she thought it, that it wasn’t.
Elena intercepted her in the lobby before she’d crossed half the floor, tablet already out, wish list visibly longer than it had been yesterday.
“We need to discuss the unveiling timeline. The board’s asking for a firm date, and there’s the guest list for the reception, which needs finalizing before—”
“Not right now, Elena.” Not unkind. Final, the finality of someone with exactly one thing left she could control and intended to go control it, thoroughly, with both hands, for at least the next hour. “Give me an hour with the scaffolding first. Then we’ll talk timelines.”
Elena studied her a second longer than the request strictly warranted. “You’re going to tell me eventually,” she said, mild, already turning back toward the front desk. “I can wait. I’m excellent at waiting. It’s on my performance reviews.” Elena made a note, and let her pass, disappearing back toward the front desk with the brisk efficiency of someone juggling far more than one contractor’s unexplained mood.
Jen fell into step beside Elena a moment later, tablet of her own in hand, murmuring a quick note about the delivery schedule that Romily caught only fragments of on her way toward the atrium — nothing that registered as anything other than the ordinary machinery of a hotel running exactly the way it was supposed to.
The atrium welcomed her exactly as it always had — vast, half-transformed, her suspended panels catching the morning light and throwing it back in shapes that owed nothing to the ordinary physics governing every other piece of glass in the building. Knowing what she now knew about why the panels did that made the sight land differently. She stood at the base of the scaffolding a moment longer than usual, looking up at two weeks of her own work with the vertigo of someone realizing a familiar object had been a completely different thing the whole time and had simply never mentioned it.
You could have said so, she told the nearest panel, silently, absurdly. All this time. A little warning would have been nice.
The panel offered no comment. It rarely did, which was, on balance, one of its better qualities.
She reached out and pressed her palm flat against the glass, on principle, curiosity finally winning out over everything else competing for her attention. Nothing happened. No hum, no glow, no dramatic swell of dragon-adjacent energy rippling out through her fingers to confirm she’d become a woman with actual powers overnight. It was ordinary glass — cool, faintly dusty, wholly uninterested in performing for her benefit.
“Anticlimactic,” she informed it. “I was promised magic. This feels like a scam.”
She tried the next panel over, thoroughness demanding at least one more attempt. Also nothing. Somewhere below, if anyone had been watching, they’d have seen a woman in a harness pressing her hand against six different pieces of architectural glass with the gravity of a scientist and getting zero results for her trouble, which struck her, once she’d worked through the whole row, as either deeply reassuring or deeply insulting. She hadn’t decided which.
Later, she promised the glass, and herself, and climbed back to the actual work.
She climbed. The harness took her weight with the same worn familiarity it always did, straps broken in from months of this, and the tightness in her shoulders eased the higher she got — the ordinary, physical logic of ropes and tension and the correct angle to hang suspended glass so it caught the light instead of fighting it. This, at least, obeyed rules she understood. This didn’t require her to reconsider two years of her own life through a completely different lens before lunch.
She measured. She checked the mounting brackets on the panel that had been giving her trouble since Tuesday, found the hairline misalignment she’d suspected was there, and corrected it with the satisfaction of solving a problem that stayed solved once you solved it — unlike, say, international dragon politics, or the current state of her personal life over the last twenty-four hours.
“You,” she told the panel, low enough that nobody below would hear her negotiating with architectural glass again, “are going to cooperate today. I’ve had a very long night. I’ve learned that I’m apparently magic, in a deeply inconvenient way. I don’t have the room for your attitude on top of everything else currently happening in my life.”
The panel, wisely, didn’t argue back.
