Chapter 40 （continued）
Nika
It was a Wednesday.
Midweek. Nothing distinguished it from any other Wednesday except the fluorescent lighting and the usual rhythm of a floor that had settled back into its routines.
Andy was in a managerial meeting—the kind that ran long and achieved little.
Francis was describing her date in elaborate detail, ostensibly for my benefit but really for the pleasure of telling it, pausing at strategic intervals in the hope that I’d offer something in return. Something about a certain CEO perhaps.
Carla was pretending to work.
Graham had the permanent thousand-yard stare of a man who had survived something he couldn’t discuss in polite company and was simply getting on with things.
A normal day.
Except for the thing that hadn’t been normal for the last week.
It had started quietly—the way most significant things did.
A low persistent warmth in the pit of my stomach that I’d filed under stress, then under disrupted sleep, then under the general category of things I was choosing not to examine too closely.
Bad Girl had refused to acknowledge it entirely, which told me everything I needed to know about what it actually was.
She never ignored things that didn’t matter.
The nights had gotten worse.
I’d wake in the small hours from dreams I couldn’t hold on to—fragments that dissolved the moment I reached for them, leaving behind only heat and damp sheets and a restlessness that had no outlet at that hour.
I’d lie there in the dark feeling like something was pulling at me from the inside, something that had been patient long enough and was running out of patience.
I wasn’t on my period.
I knew what this was.
I’d known for days. Bad Girl had known longer. Neither of us had said it out loud because saying it out loud made it a thing that was happening rather than a thing that might be happening, and there was a significant practical difference between those two positions.
Today the cramp arrived.
Not sharp—a deep rolling pressure, low in my stomach, the kind that gathered and held and made the ambient noise of the floor feel suddenly too loud, too close, the voices merging into a single undifferentiated hum that pressed against the inside of my skull.
The scent in the air was wrong.
All of it wrong—the coffee, the cleaning products, the accumulated humanity of eight teams doing their Wednesday things. None of it right. None of it what my body was demanding with increasing and non-negotiable clarity.
I knew who could make it right.
I reached for my phone and my bag.
“I’m not feeling great,” I said, standing.
Francis looked up mid-sentence. Her eyes moved across my face with the focused attention of someone doing a rapid assessment.
“Your face is all flushed.” Genuine concern. “Maybe you’re coming down with something?”
She raised both index fingers and crossed them at me.
I gave her the finger and turned to leave.
“Feel better soon,” she called after me, with the special warmth of someone who cared enough to be concerned while wanting me to keep my potential disease to myself.
“Doesn’t she need to let someone know she’s leaving?” Carla’s voice, behind me.
“They’re all in a meeting.” Francis. The bite in it unmistakable even through the closing doors. “What’s she supposed to do?”
The secure doors swung shut.
The floor noise dropped away.
And the heat arrived properly—not the background warmth of the past weeks but something fuller, a fever that joined the cramping and made the corridor feel too bright and slightly unreal. I pressed the lift button and stood very still and breathed through it.
You know what’s happening, Bad Girl said. Not unkindly. Just a fact. You’re going to the solution.
I knew.
She knew.
Somewhere on an executive floor above me, Conrí and Kael knew too—or would, the moment the lift doors opened. I had no plan beyond the next floor. No words prepared. No professional framing for what I was about to do.
Somewhere between the park runs and the shared meals and the walks through places that had been standing longer than either of our bloodlines, this had been building. Quietly. Inevitably. With the patient momentum of something that had never needed our permission.
The lift arrived.
I stepped inside.
The doors closed on a Wednesday that had just stopped being ordinary.
??
??
??
His floor was well-lit.
More windows. More sunlight. More space. Better artwork on the walls—actual art, not the motivational print someone had ordered in bulk for the lower floors.
It irritated me.
All of it irritated me. The light was too bright. The air conditioning too present. The carpet too clean and too quiet and too far from the only scent that was going to make any of this bearable.
I sniffed.
Closed my eyes.
My lungs couldn’t get enough of it. Traces of him—threaded through the ventilation, caught in the fabric of the chairs, layered into the very air of the floor he occupied every day. Rich and warm and completely unavoidable.
Addictive was the only word.
Was this what substance abuse felt like? The specific, narrowing logic of just one more. Just one more breath. One more hit. One more second of this before I have to function like a normal person again.
“Ms Horvat? Are you okay?”
My eyes snapped open.
Nora. Holding the door to Conrí’s private reception area. Composed. Professional. Looking at me with the careful expression of someone who had not been trained for this specific situation.
Self-important entitled little shithead—
FOCUS, Bad Girl snapped.
I am focused, I snarled back. Part of me wants to kill him. This is his fault.
A pause.
That will pass, she said. Most likely.
“I’m here to see him,” I said, slipping past Nora.
“I’m afraid he’s currently—”
I stopped.
Turned.
The look I gave her was not something I entirely controlled. Long. Still. Bad Girl pressing right up against the surface of it with everything she had.
Nora’s eyes widened fractionally.
The calculation crossed her face in real time—was she paid enough for this? The answer was clearly and immediately no.
“I’ll just—get a drink,” she said, and closed the door behind her with quiet dignity.
Smart woman.
His scent was stronger here. Concentrated. I followed it without thinking—past the reception desk, down the short corridor, to the door at the end.
I turned the handle and pushed it open.