17. Lena
LENA
I caught myself staring at the computer screen. The number hadn’t changed. Neither had my ability to care about it.
The Midsummer Gala was three weeks out. We had seven corporate retreats booked for July, a wedding party arriving next Tuesday, and the restaurant critic from Denver showing up sometime this month without advance notice because that was how restaurant critics operated.
I should have been in my element. Instead, I was stuck on the same spreadsheet for ten minutes while my mind kept drifting back to this morning.
The sculpture on his nightstand, small and rough and unfinished. His voice, quiet and raw, when he said his mother had been making it for him. A birthday gift for a little boy who never got to receive it from his mother.
“What was it going to be?”
“A wolf.”
I set down my pen and pressed my fingertips against my eyelids until I saw stars.
A wolf. The scars on his back that looked like claws had raked through his flesh.
The way his eyes caught light strangely in dim rooms, reflecting gold for half a heartbeat before settling back to gray.
The wildness I could feel underneath his control, that animal current running beneath the surface of everything he was.
His mother had been making him a wolf. And claws, not human hands, but claws had carved those marks into his back.
“What kind of animal did this?” I had asked him, that night after Stephanie. He had kissed me before I could finish the question. Distracted me with his mouth, his hands, the overwhelming heat of him.
Now I wondered if the distraction had been intentional.
I was missing a piece. An important piece. A piece he was hiding, or a piece I was refusing to see. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it long enough to do my job.
A knock on my office door made me jump.
Sophie leaned against the frame, her hair escaping its twist the way it always did by late afternoon. “You’ve been staring at that calendar for twenty minutes. Either you’re planning world domination or you’re somewhere else entirely.”
“Event logistics.” I shuffled papers that didn’t need shuffling. “The gala alone has forty-seven moving pieces.”
“Uh-huh.” Sophie didn’t move from the doorway. “And which of those forty-seven pieces requires you to look like someone stole your coffee and replaced it with existential dread?”
I almost smiled. Almost.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”
“You’ve been tired for ten days straight. At some point that stops being tired and starts being something else.” She pushed off the doorframe and disappeared, only to return a couple minutes later with a plate balanced in one hand and two forks in the other. “Ratty says you skipped lunch. Again.”
She set the plate on my desk, pushing aside the spreadsheet I had been pretending to work on.
Lemon cake, still warm from the oven, with that perfect glaze Ratty had been making since before I could walk.
Our head chef had been feeding me comfort food since I was five years old, and he had an uncanny ability to know when I needed it most.
“I had coffee,” I said weakly.
“Coffee is not food.” Sophie handed me a fork. “Eat. Then talk.”
I took a bite because arguing with Sophie was pointless, and because the cake was perfect, and because sometimes it was easier to give in than to explain why I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt hungry.
The sweetness melted on my tongue, familiar and comforting in a way that made my eyes sting.
Sophie watched me eat half the slice before she spoke again. “Talk to me.”
I should have deflected. Should have redirected to work talk, to the gala planning, to anything that didn’t require me to examine what was happening inside my own head.
Instead, I heard myself say, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Sophie waited. She was good at that.
“With Raphael.” The name felt different in my mouth now. Less like a curse and more like a question. “I told him I’m not running. But I don’t know what staying means. I don’t know what any of this means.”
“Do you need to know right now?”
The question caught me off guard. “What?”
“You’ve spent the last month being angry.
Being certain. Being absolutely sure that he was the enemy.
” Sophie tilted her head, studying me with the same careful attention she gave difficult guests.
“Maybe you don’t have to know what it means yet.
Maybe you just have to stay long enough to figure it out. ”
It sounded reasonable. It sounded like good advice from a woman who had seen me through worse crises than this one.
So why did it feel like standing at the edge of a cliff, trying to decide whether the water below was deep enough to catch me?
Sophie left eventually, summoned away by a crisis at the spa that I should have been handling myself.
I made the usual promises to finish the calendar and get some rest, knowing I would keep none of them.
My mind was stuck on the man I had left this morning, his mother’s unfinished wolf still watching over him from the nightstand.
To distract myself, I pulled up the security access logs. The system was one of the first things I had modernized after taking over operations, back when proving myself felt like the only thing that mattered.
The logs scrolled across my screen in neat columns.
Employee badge swipes, keycard access times, entry and exit stamps for every door in the building.
I was looking for patterns. Anything that might connect to the stalker who had killed Stephanie, who had left dead animals in our storage rooms, who had somehow known my schedule well enough to escalate every time I started to feel safe.
An hour in, my eyes burning from the screen glare, I found something.
The loading dock access records showed a keycard entry at 2:47 AM three nights before Stephanie died.
A maintenance staff credential. Normal enough, except that when I cross-referenced the employee schedule, no maintenance shifts were logged for that night.
The building had been empty except for security.
I pulled up the camera footage for that timestamp. The loading dock feed showed nothing. Just empty concrete and the yellow glow of the security lights. No movement. No delivery trucks. No maintenance worker.
But the keycard had registered an entry. Someone had swiped in and done nothing that the cameras could see.
I scrolled back through earlier weeks. Found two more anomalies. Same pattern. Keycard swipes during empty hours, camera feeds showing nothing unusual. All maintenance credentials. All logged to a single employee ID.
Gerald Finch. Maintenance supervisor.
My stomach dropped. Gerald was in his sixties now, gray peppering his sable beard, but I remembered him as the guy who fixed the sound system at my tenth birthday party and let me hand him tools like I was helping. He had been here longer than I had been alive.
I saved screenshots of the log entries and checked the staff schedule. Gerald was on shift on Friday morning.
This was my hotel. My staff. Before I pointed anyone’s suspicions at a man who had known me since childhood, I needed to hear his side of the story.
The afternoon bled into evening. The hotel quieted around me as the day shift gave way to night. I should have gone upstairs to my old room, or back to the manor, or anywhere that wasn’t this office with its stale coffee and half-finished paperwork.
I stayed anyway. Avoiding both homes because I wasn’t sure which one felt more dangerous.
Around nine, I finally gave up on the spreadsheet. I meant to go upstairs to my room, get some sleep, face the confusion with fresh eyes tomorrow.
Instead, I texted Parsons.
He pulled up to the hotel entrance fifteen minutes later, the black SUV as familiar as my own reflection by now. Raphael’s driver, Raphael’s security, Raphael’s way of keeping me safe without being asked. I had stopped arguing about it weeks ago.
I slid into the back seat without a word, and Parsons drove toward the manor on the hill. The route had become automatic.
The gates opened as we approached. Lights glowed warm in the ground-floor windows. He was still awake.
Parsons pulled up to the front entrance and I sat for a moment, hand on the door, trying to understand what I was doing here. The contract said my evenings belonged to him, but that wasn’t why I had texted Parsons. That wasn’t why my hand was already reaching for the door.
I got out anyway. Because I couldn’t seem to stop myself. Because his scent was starting to feel like home, and that scared me more than anything else.
The front door was unlocked. I let myself in, following the soft glow of lamplight toward his study.
He was on the leather couch, papers spread across the coffee table, a cup of coffee gone cold at his elbow.
Investigation notes, probably. He had been chasing leads all week, trying to find who had killed Stephanie, who had been terrorizing the hotel.
Looking in all the wrong places, if the lack of results was any indication.
He looked up when I appeared in the doorway. His expression shifted through surprise into warmth, into quiet hope he didn’t try to hide.
He didn’t ask why I was here. Just moved the papers aside to make room, creating space for me without demanding explanations.
I crossed the room and sat on the opposite end of the couch. Close enough to feel his presence, far enough to maintain the illusion of distance. As if distance meant anything anymore.
Silence settled between us. Not uncomfortable. Not charged the way it used to be, all that hostile tension sparking every time we occupied the same space.
This was different. Easier. Like two people who had exhausted their need to fight and discovered they might actually like the quiet.
“Long day?” His voice was low, careful not to disturb whatever fragile peace we had found.
“Long week. Long month.” I let out a breath. “I couldn’t stop thinking.”