Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
IRINA
A s if the encounter with Skotos wasn’t enough to disrupt the day, Mara wasn’t in.
Her office lights were off. No note. No texts. Just Mara’s gloves folded neatly on her workstation, like she’d slipped out of her skin and just wandered off.
Weird. She was always here before me. Quiet as a ghost, but still here . Today, of all days, when I wanted— needed— answers she wasn’t here. The readings. The ivy. The walls.
So many questions. Including why did I keep waking up with soil under my fingernails? Was sleep-gardening even a thing? Skotos just added more questions to my ever-growing list.
The greenhouse air was thicker than usual, warmer too.
The humidity monitor was calibrated, but everything felt a few degrees too alive.
The plants turned more quickly toward movement.
The mimosa pudicas flinched before I touched them.
Even Regrowth seemed agitated, petals twitching open and shut like breath.
The puppy, still unnamed, sat curled in the sun spot on my office floor, chin resting on his adorable paws. Watching me. The white paw just seemed to gleam against all the darkness.
“You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?” I muttered.
He didn’t blink.
By midday, I gave up waiting for Mara to come in “late.” The staff calendar showed nothing. Not PTO. No meetings. Just a sudden absence that felt… deliberate. So when the front desk buzzed my line with a visitor I wasn’t expecting, I was already on edge.
“Someone from the city,” Mindy, the assistant, said, trying to sound casual. “Says he’s here to tour the Annex as a potential arts patron.”
“City doesn’t do private patronage,” I said, already suspicious.
“He’s not with the city,” she added, lower like she’d turned and covered the microphone to keep her words hushed. “But he’s got that look .”
I sighed. Mindy was easy to persuade with a pretty face. “What look?”
“You’ll see.”
“Well,” I said to the puppy, “I guess we’ll find out.” Unfortunately, Mindy proved to be correct. He had the look.
Tall, dark, expensive—like a sculpture of a man that had been taught how to move convincingly.
He wore a sleek black shirt, no tie, unbuttoned just enough to suggest heat tolerance or arrogance.
His blazer was slate-gray, tailored to within an inch of its life, and he wore his confidence like a scent.
His hair was neatly tousled, jaw sharp, sunglasses tucked into his collar like they’d never seen actual sun. A scar traced his jawline, but the roughness of it seemed to enhance his beauty. An aesthetic, not an accident.
He smiled when I stepped into the atrium. Not wide, just enough. His expression said he expected this to be fun.
Well, that made one of us.
“Ms. Bloom,” he said, voice smooth with a rasp at the edge. “I’ve heard good things.”
“And who exactly have you heard them from?” I asked, not smiling at all.
His grin deepened into a delighted one. “That would ruin the charm of mystery, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t do mystery tours.”
“Then think of this as a courtship.” He offered a hand. “I’m Kassian Harpe. I represent a small fund that’s very interested in immersive bio-art. Future Flora, especially.”
Kassian Harpe.
The name meant nothing, but I’d heard worse pitches.
It wasn’t like we were flush with donors who didn’t want to install NFTs or algorithmic nonsense among the orchids.
Still, I didn’t trust anyone who led with charm before credentials.
While he held out his hand, I didn’t accept.
“I don’t take potential donors through exhibits without notice. ”
“I’m not just a donor,” he said easily enough and let his hand lower to smooth down his lapels. “I’m an admirer.”
“Of plants?” I doubted my tone could get much drier.
“You misunderstand.” He stepped closer. “I am a great admirer of power that grows slowly and doesn’t ask permission.”
That stopped me.
Because it didn’t sound like a line. It sounded like something older. Like something I’d heard before, maybe in a dream. Maybe in dirt.
Or maybe in a book, I scolded myself. “Shall we take our conversation elsewhere?” I motioned to the hall and guided him away from the front.
While I might not take him on a tour, I didn’t need to continue the interaction with our avid audience, and Mindy hadn’t taken her eyes off him since I arrived.
The puppy padded out of my office before we were even halfway down the hall, tail wagging faintly and nose twitching.
Kassian dropped to one knee, completely unbothered by putting his pressed suit trousers to the tiled floor. He extended his hand again this time to my puppy.
“Well now,” he murmured. “Aren’t you something rare?”
The dog didn’t move at first, just stared. Then, slowly, he stepped forward and sniffed. He didn’t lick, didn’t nuzzle, just stood there with his nose barely an inch from Kassian’s fingers as if weighing the scent he detected.
Kassian didn’t force it when the puppy made no further moves. “Apparently, he’s no more interested in taking my hand than you were.” He rose, then brushed imaginary dust from his trousers as he turned to face me.
“Neither of us know you.” Not that I should have to remind him of that. Part of me was pleased that the puppy didn’t just wiggle in happiness for the man.
“It’s funny,” Kassian said. “Dogs usually love me.”
“Maybe he has a different palate,” I suggested, folding my arms.
“Or perhaps he’s cautious, like you .” He glanced down the hall leading toward the exhibit. “There’s nothing wrong with caution, Ms. Bloom. I find only the careless act without it.”
Somehow, that wasn’t a comfort.
“Tell you what,” he said, turning back. “Let me buy you a drink sometime. You can vet me properly. Ask for references. I’ll even bring a notarized document assuring you I know the difference between a moss wall and a mood board.”
Was that his idea of a joke? I stared at him. “Or, you could do something inventive, like just tell me what you’re actually looking for.”
“You,” he said, lips curving. “Obviously.”
“Then you should make an appointment.” It came out far snippier than I intended. But Kassian Harpe seemed like a man who rarely heard the word “no” and should probably have it drummed into him.
“I’ll do that.” His smile deepened, and he inclined his head before he strode down the hall back toward the atrium and the entrance. “You’ll hear from me.” His promise floated back and left me even more unsettled than I’d been before.
When he disappeared through the door the puppy whined once. Soft. Low.
I felt it again, that tug behind my ribs. Not fear. Not desire. Just—something stranger. A memory. What kind of memory?
I had no idea. The lack of answers might drive me mad.
Two men in four days.
Two.
Both impossibly composed. Both saying too much and not enough. Both watching me like they were looking for something specific. And both of them were here for me . Or so they said.
That didn’t land right.
I was hardly the kind of person people just…
showed up for. I organized, I curated, I moved things into harmony and made them run smoothly.
I didn’t attract mysterious men with cheekbones sharp enough to draw blood and voices that sounded like rain sliding down iron.
That happened to other people. People who wore flawless cosmetics, styled their hair perfectly, and didn’t second-guess the way they walked into rooms.
I glanced down at myself—loose linen shirt, soil-stained pants, sneakers with scuffed toes. Not exactly cursed with main character energy.
Still, it had happened. Twice .
I half-laughed under my breath as I dug into my desk drawer for a granola bar. My fingers brushed over my phone, and without thinking, I picked it up and hovered over the call screen.
Mom.
The name looked out of place. Too soft. Too simple. Yet, I nearly tapped it. She always told me I had a kind of intuition that gave me a green thumb, and the stubbornness to never quite trust it. She’d know what to say about all of this.
About them .
I hesitated, my thumb hovered, and then the greenhouse shuddered. Just once, but the vibration was unmistakable. Not the building. Not the street outside. The greenhouse .
I dropped the phone and left my office on a course to the exhibit corridor.
Heart in my throat and fearing the worst, I pushed open the door.
Everything looked the same. Light filtered gold through the mist glass.
Vines curled neatly along their lattices.
The digital humidity readouts were still green.
It was fine, but then— The air shifted and the scent changed. Something wrong bloomed under the usual notes of moss and ozone. It was burnt copper and crushed jasmine, sickly sweet and electric.
I turned sharply toward the Future Flora exhibit.
Regrowth was trembling.
Not opening. Not reacting to anyone’s presence. Just shaking.
Each petal quivered at its edge, as if caught in a nonexistent breeze. The core stem bent ever so slightly toward the floor. An invisible weight pulling it downward.
I took a step closer just as the mist system hissed. A shadow flickered beneath the mesh floor. Then another. I froze in place.
There was nothing under the flooring. Just the support structure, the sub-misters, and the fiber-optic threads that connected each installation to the rest of the sensory web. I knew every inch of it, because I’d helped to design the grid.
Then something moved again, fluid and slow. If my imagination wasn’t playing tricks on me, I’d think it was the roots themselves shifting beneath the loose soil.
The puppy let out a single, sharp bark from behind me.
His first. Shock jerked through me, galvanizing my pulse to racing.
I shot a look back at him. He was stiff-legged in the doorway to the hall.
The door that should have closed behind me.
His fur bristled and his dark eyes locked on the floor beneath Regrowth . Ears forward. Tail low.
A warning.
“I see it too,” I whispered as much to comfort the puppy as myself. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but the air was pressing in from everywhere and I was staring at the trembling bloom. It was so dense in here, it was almost hard to breathe and the pressure closed in.
Then—just as quickly—it stopped.
Everything.
The tremors. The scent. The flicker.
All gone.
Regrowth stood still again. Perfect. Serene. Like she’d never moved at all.
My hands shook, but nothing else in the room did. I wasn’t exactly afraid, but something inside of me vibrated in almost perfect tune with what I’d just witnessed.
And I had seen it. Even the puppy reacted to it.
Confirmation.
I backed away slowly, not quite willing to turn away from Regrowth . The puppy followed me as soon as I made it to the door and out. Then I closed it.
Once back in my office, I shut the office door and leaned against it. The once again silent puppy stared up at me. The room felt smaller, less safe. The edges seemed to have warped in my short absence.
“Okay,” I whispered, exhaling a hard breath and trying to get my pulse under control. “We’re going to do some research.”
Two men.
Crazy plant activity.
Monitors off.
Yes, we needed to do some research.
I sat down at my desk and logged into my computer. With trembling fingers, I typed in Kassian Harpe to the search bar.
Nothing.
No social presence. No company site. No board memberships. Just a name.
I tabbed to a different program and logged into security, then searched through the stills for the time when Harpe arrived. I captured one via the plugin we used for safety reviews and saved it.
With that done, I refined the query to do a reverse image search. That got me something, but not remotely what I expected.
The same face. Different name—no, not just one name. Multiple names.
Sebastian Rhagos, venture backer for a weapons lab in Nevada.
Lucien Varo, keynote speaker at an “elite resilience summit” in 2019. What even was elite resilience?
Unknown male in the background of a grainy photo dated in the 1990s. The man shook hands with a U.S. general and had the exact same face as Harpe. Not aged a day.
There were more names. More activities.
One man. Dozens of names. Dozens of suits. No other trail to follow. A search on those names turned up the same as Kassian Harpe.
Leaning back in the chair, I stared at my reflection in the dark screen and then down at the puppy who had crept closer to lean against my leg.
“Right,” I said softly. “Not just charm. Definitely not just charm.”
I pulled open the drawer with my cell phone again. I could still call Mom, and tell her what?
That was the point, I didn’t even know what was going on to tell her. I shut the drawer again. Then, heart hammering, I returned to the search bar and typed in Graven Skotos, then hit enter.
I needed more.