5. Jupiter
JUPITER
By the end of my second week, I know three things about Nocturne that the employee handbook — a document so vague it's essentially decorative — never mentions.
The first is that the staff runs on a fear that isn't loud.
It doesn't announce itself. It lives in the way conversations pause when Malachi walks through a room and resume only once he's cleared the doorway.
In the way certain questions get answered with a redirect so smooth you almost don't notice the original question never got touched.
The second is that the club is genuinely, almost frustratingly beautiful to work in. The kind of venue that makes events look good by accident, and my job, stripped of everything else, is to make sure it earns that.
The third is that two floors above the main event spaces, there is a corridor I've been directed around three times now by three different people with three different excuses, and whatever is up there is guarded by men who don't appear in the staff directory.
I file all three things and keep working.
The Hargrove anniversary is four weeks out.
I've rebuilt the event brief from scratch.
New vendor roster, revised floor plan, a catering menu that actually reflects the clients' preferences rather than whatever Petra assumed.
Tuesday afternoon, the catering vendor calls to inform me that the signature dish requires an ingredient their primary supplier can no longer provide, effective immediately, and that they consider this my problem to solve.
I'm still on the phone with them, pulling up contract clauses on my laptop with one hand, when Malachi appears in the doorway of the event office. I hold up a finger without breaking from the call.
"Then source it from your secondary supplier. Your contract with Nocturne requires it. If you'd like to revisit the contract terms, I can have our legal team contact yours by end of business." A pause on the other end. "I'll take that as confirmation. Thank you."
I hang up. Malachi is watching me from the doorway with his arms crossed, dark suit immaculate, the natural command of a man rarely questioned.
"The Aldridge supplier," It isn't a question.
"They're cutting corners on secondary sourcing. I'm flagging it for the next two events as well." I turn back to my laptop. "I need a backup caterer approved before the Hargrove date."
He comes into the room and stops at the end of the planning table.
I've noticed he does this. Moves through spaces like the contents of them are already his, because they are, but the habit still registers.
He looks at the vendor spreadsheet on my screen without being invited to.
"Calloway Catering. Not on the preferred list because Petra had a personal grievance with the owner.
The food is considerably better than anything Aldridge has delivered in the past year. I'll send you the contact."
"Thank you." I make the note. Then, because I'm curious, "If you knew Aldridge was cutting corners, why keep them on the roster?"
"The contract had eight months remaining. Breaking it early would have cost more than the corners they were cutting." The line lands flat and deliberate. "It wasn't ignorance. It was arithmetic."
"Very comforting."
Something shifts in his expression. The place warmth would occupy, if it were ever allowed that far. "You'd prefer I make expensive decisions on principle?"
"I'd prefer suppliers who do what they're contracted to do."
"So would I," he says. "Which is why you're replacing them." He pauses with the dry reluctance of a man weighing whether to continue. "For what it's worth, the Aldridge owner is also deeply unpleasant in person. The arithmetic and the satisfaction occasionally align."
He is entirely composed. That was a joke. A small, grey, almost imperceptible joke, delivered with such restraint it barely survived the journey out of his mouth.
"That's almost funny," I say.
"Almost," he agrees, and he says it with such flat sincerity that it actually is. I turn back to my laptop before whatever is happening in my expression becomes something he can catalog.
The tasting event is Thursday, Calloway's senior manager brings a full sample menu and three wine pairings, Alessio materializes within twenty minutes of it starting, easing into the chair beside me as though presence has never been something he had to justify.
For the first hour he behaves well enough.
Genuinely useful, actually, pointing out that the duck course's sauce is too heavy for a late-evening anniversary menu and asking the kind of pointed catering questions that reveal he's done this before.
Then the third wine pairing arrives and the Calloway manager steps out to take a call.
Alessio tops up my glass and turns to face me with the particular quality of attention that means the professional portion of the evening has concluded.
"Can I ask you something?" he says.
"You're going to regardless."
He smiles. "The man you were seeing before you took this job. How long ago did that end?"
I set my wine down. "That's not relevant to the Hargrove menu."
"No," he agrees easily. "I'm not asking about the Hargrove menu."
"Alessio—"
"Eight months? A year?" He tilts his head, examining me as though comparing reality against a judgment already made. "You have the particular self-sufficiency of someone who stopped waiting for someone else to handle things a while ago. It's attractive, but it also suggests a vacancy."
My face is doing something warm. I am aware of it and annoyed about it. "You don't know anything about my personal life."
"I know you came to a Thursday night work event with your hair done." He says it without cruelty, just the calm observation of someone reading a room. "You weren't expecting it to be entirely professional."
"My hair is always done."
"It's different tonight." His voice drops a register, unhurried. "The way you've pinned it up, it shows your neck. I don't think that's accidental."
The warmth in my face moves south toward something less manageable. I reach for my wine glass because it gives my hands something to do. "You're spectacularly inappropriate."
"I've been told." He doesn't move closer but he doesn't need to. He has a way of making the space between two people feel smaller without adjusting it physically, like gravity that starts from somewhere behind his eyes. "Does it bother you? Genuinely."
The honest answer is that it doesn't bother me the way it should.
The honest answer is that something about being looked at by Alessio Virelli is like standing in front of a window that reflects you back more accurately than a mirror.
Uncomfortable and clarifying in equal, unsettling parts. I don't give him the honest answer.
"It makes me want to finish reviewing the dessert course," I say.
He laughs, low and open, and when the Calloway manager returns Alessio slides smoothly back into professional mode so seamlessly it would be invisible to anyone who hadn't been in the room thirty seconds ago. Under the table my knee is bouncing slightly and I stop it.
By nine-thirty the tasting is done, the contract is initiated, and I've been in this building for thirteen hours. I'm in the corridor pulling my coat on, bags over both shoulders, when Viktor steps out of the stairwell ahead of me.
He removes the heavier bag from my shoulder without a word and falls into step beside me. I've stopped protesting this. The bag will end up on his shoulder either way.
In the elevator, I ask him where he parked. He tells me he drove a separate car. When I ask why, he says Malachi requested he see me home, and when I press for the reason behind that request, Viktor looks at me in the polished metal of the elevator wall and says, simply, "He didn't offer one."
"Did you ask?"
A pause. "No."
"Does he usually explain himself?"
"Not to me."
"But you followed the instruction anyway."
A measured pause. "I follow most of his instructions."
"Most," I catch. "Not all."
Something in his jaw shifts fractionally. "Most," he repeats, and there's a finality to it that closes the question without slamming it.
We drive in two cars through the city, his dark vehicle behind mine the whole way.
When I pull up outside my building on Vellum Street, he pulls up behind me and gets out.
He carries my bag to the entrance without being asked.
The street is quiet, a fine rain just beginning, and the light above my building's door casts everything in a weak yellow glow that makes the wet pavement shine.
"You don't have to walk me in," I say.
He scans the building entrance, the street in both directions, the narrow alley to the left, all of it in about four seconds. Then he hands me the bag.
"Third floor," he says. "Lock the deadbolt, not just the knob."
I stare at him. "How do you know I'm on the third floor?"
He doesn't answer that, which is its own answer, and something cold moves through me that has no relation to the rain.
"Viktor." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Why does Malachi know what floor I live on?"
His eyes hold mine and there is something in them. Not quite apology, not quite warning, but something that lives in the territory between the two. "Lock the deadbolt," he says again, quietly.
He waits on the pavement until I've gone through the door. I can see him through the lobby glass when I reach the staircase. Still standing in the rain, watching the entrance, one hand loose at his side.
I lock the deadbolt.
I stand in my kitchen for a while after, coat still on. Malachi knowing my floor number sits in my chest. The way Viktor looked at me when I asked sits beside everything else I am not examining. All the things in this building that feel like safety until you examine them from a different angle.
My phone shows a text from my grandmother asking how the new job is going.
I put it face-down on the counter and don't answer it yet.