Chapter 30
ZATANNA
The next morning, I walk into the office feeling different.
Not fixed. Not settled. Definitely not sane. But different.
For once, the difference doesn’t feel bad.
The city is gray outside, all wet sidewalks and steam rising from vents, but I feel oddly light as I step out of the elevator and onto the office floor.
Not because anything is resolved. God, nothing is resolved.
Aleksei’s mother is still in the hospital.
His father is still a snake in an expensive suit. The inheritance clock is still ticking.
But somewhere between the hospital hallway and the silence in the car home, I stopped pretending this is just sex.
It isn’t. I know that now.
I know I feel something for him. More than wanting him. More than the way my body reacts when he looks at me. More than the stupid thrill of danger and secrecy and all the ways he keeps rearranging my life without permission.
And yes, maybe it’s insane to admit that after two weeks.
Maybe I should be more skeptical. More cynical. More capable of self-preservation.
But the truth is still the truth. I feel something for him.
And I’m not even fully terrified of that yet.
So I walk in with coffee in one hand and my bag on my shoulder and for the first time in days, I don’t feel like I’m carrying around a bruise where my heart should be.
I feel almost... hopeful. Which is probably why the universe chooses that exact moment to ruin me.
“Morning,” I say as I pass Owen’s desk.
He looks up. Then immediately looks down.
Lina is by the printer. She hears me, turns halfway, gives me a tight little smile, then suddenly remembers something very important on the paper tray.
Vivian doesn’t even bother pretending. She just watches me over the rim of her glasses with the kind of stillness that tells me something is wrong before anyone says a word.
I slow. The floor sounds different, strikingly quiet. That strange hush offices get when everyone is pretending not to look at the same thing.
My skin goes cold.
I keep walking toward my desk anyway, because maybe I’m imagining it. Maybe they’re all tired. Maybe I’m just primed for paranoia after everything that happened.
Then I hear it. A snicker.
Not loud. Not cruel enough to be open. Just tucked into the space between two cubicles like a blade slipped under a door.
My stomach drops. I set my coffee down too carefully and look around. No one meets my eyes now. That is worse than if they stared.
“What?” I ask.
No answer.
I look at Owen. “What?”
He opens his mouth, closes it again.
Lina looks stricken.
And then, from somewhere behind me, a man’s voice I barely know says in a fake-whisper that carries way too well, “Maybe ask her for her rates.”
Laughter. Small. Nervous. Real.
For one second, I don’t understand.
Then I do.
And my whole body goes numb.
No. No, no, no.
Another voice, female this time, murmurs, “I mean, those were definitely her, right?”
A screen glows on a desk across the aisle. For half a second, before the person sitting there angles it away, I see a waveform.
An audio player. My throat closes. It’s out.
Somehow, impossibly, the voice recordings are out.
The ones with my voice all velvet and heat and confidence I had to invent because confidence didn’t come naturally to me anywhere else.
The room starts to tilt.
Someone says, not quietly enough, “So what, she was like a hooker?”
More laughter. My heartbeat turns violent.
I can’t feel my hands.
I can’t feel my face.
All I can feel is humiliation, hot and total and suffocating, rising so fast it makes me dizzy.
This is it. This is the nightmare. Not abstract shame.
Not the vague fear of being found out. This, exactly this: strangers looking at me and hearing those files and reducing me in one second to something dirty, laughable, disposable.
I can feel every year of trying to leave my old life behind crack open all at once.
The cheap recording booth. Jake’s approving thumbs-up. Cup noodles on my mattress while I applied to jobs I thought were real. The first time I heard my own voice played back and hated how much stronger she sounded than I was.
All of it. All of it exposed.
My eyes sting. I will not cry here.
I will die before I cry here.
I look toward Aleksei’s office on pure instinct, but the glass is empty. He isn’t there. Because if he were, no one on this floor would dare make a sound.
Another snicker. That does it.
I grab my bag so hard it nearly topples the coffee, turn, and walk as fast as I can without running.
Then someone behind me says, “Guess she’s not denying it.”
And the last shred of control I have snaps.
I run.
Not elegantly. Not with dignity. I run straight down the aisle, past the copier, past Vivian’s desk, past Lina whispering my name, past every face I can feel but refuse to look at.
By the time I reach the elevator, I can’t breathe properly.
My chest hurts. My ears are ringing. I punch the button once, twice, then don’t wait for it at all.
I bolt for the stairwell instead, shoving through the heavy door and stumbling downward in heels that were a mistake and a skirt that suddenly feels too tight and too visible and wrong.
I don’t stop until I hit the lobby.
And even there, even with cool air and marble and security and the revolving doors spinning strangers in and out of the building, I still feel like every eye is on me.
My worst nightmare came true. And it didn’t just find me.
It found me at the one place I was starting to believe I might actually belong.
The revolving doors spit me out into cold air and traffic noise and a city that does not care if I’m dying in the middle of the sidewalk.
Good. At least the city is honest.
I make it half a block before I have to stop, one hand braced on the stone wall of the building next door, the other pressed hard to my mouth like I can physically force the humiliation back down my throat.
My phone is in my bag. My hands are shaking too badly to reach for it. I can still hear the snickering. The word hooker landing in the middle of the office like something sticky and impossible to scrape off.
I should have known.
Of course it would come out like this. Of course, the one thing I kept hidden because it helped me survive would be dragged into the light the second I started thinking maybe I could have something better.
A car door slams nearby. I don’t look up. I don’t need another witness.
Then a voice says, smooth and poisonous, “Well. This is embarrassing.”
I turn slowly.
Alena stands a few feet away in a cream coat and dark sunglasses despite the weather, one hand on a leather handbag that probably cost more than my yearly income from every job I’ve ever had combined. She looks immaculate. Bored. Pleased.
Which somehow makes all of this worse.
I stare at her. “What do you want?”
She smiles, slow and cruel. “Right now? Nothing. I just happened to be nearby and saw you bolt from the building like your hair was on fire. I wondered if the office finally figured out who they hired.”
My stomach turns. So she knows.
She begins to circle me in a slow, measured arc, heels clicking softly on the pavement, like a cat that’s already sure the bird can’t fly. “You really thought,” she says, “that you could go from sex recordings to Aleksei Vasiliev without anyone noticing the gap?”
I swallow hard. “Go to hell.”
“Maybe later.” She stops in front of me again, head tilted, taking me in like I’m a puzzle she solved too quickly to respect. “Tell me, did you actually think you deserved to be with him?”
The words hit harder than the snickering did.
Because they land exactly where the worst part of me already lives.
I don’t answer.
She takes my silence as permission. “He likes strays,” she says lightly. “Broken girls. Girls who look at him like he hung the moon because they’ve never been in rooms with men like him before. It flatters him.”
My nails bite into my palms.
“And for a moment,” she continues, lips curving, “you probably let yourself believe it meant something.”
I want to slap her. I want to scream.
What I do instead is stand there and let the shame burn through every cell in my body while she watches to see if I’ll break.
She leans in slightly, voice softer now, somehow meaner for it. “You were a distraction. A warm body with a nice voice and no sense of scale. Don’t confuse that with being chosen.”
Something in me goes still.
Because maybe she’s lying. Maybe she wants to wound me because she knows exactly where to aim. Maybe this is all just another game in the elegant war she and Aleksei seem to have been fighting for years.
But standing here in the aftermath of the office, with my worst secret crawling through fluorescent hallways behind me, I don’t actually have enough self-respect left to sort poison from truth.
And that is the part I can’t forgive.
I hear my own voice in my head, flat and clear.
Leave. That’s it. Just leave.
No speeches. No tears. No dramatic confrontation in the office. No waiting for him to show up and explain why my life is currently on fire. No more being the girl who stays while richer, harder, more dangerous people decide what she is worth.
I look at Alena one last time.
And because I need one thing today to belong to me, I straighten.
Maybe it’s pride. Maybe it’s the last scrap of it.
“You know what,” I say quietly, “you can have him.”
Her smile flickers.
I turn and walk away before my legs can reconsider. Fast at first, then faster. Half a block later I duck into a café entrance just long enough to pull out my phone with clumsy fingers and open my mail.
Subject line: Resignation
My vision blurs for one second, then clears.
I type:
Dear Mr. Vasiliev,
Effective immediately, I resign from my position. Thank you for the opportunity.
Zatanna DeLaurentis
It looks pathetic. I’m pathetic right now.
I send it anyway.
Then I shut the phone off before I can see anything come back.