4. Andrei
ANDREI
My office sits on the top floor of a building that carries my name on no lease, no deed, and no document a subpoena will ever reach.
I prefer it that way. From behind my desk I can watch the river, the skyline, and every man who steps off the elevator, and that last view is the only one that has ever mattered to me.
I was three columns deep into figures that had to balance before a shipment moved, and the quiet was exactly the way I like it.
Six men work this floor, and not one of them speaks unless spoken to. It is not fear, exactly. It is the understanding that a careless sentence in my business can shorten a life, and every one of them has seen the proof. So when a man interrupts me, it is never for nothing.
Then Yuri knocked. “Boss. Miss Zoe Williams is here.”
My pen stopped against the page. “What is that brat doing in my building?”
“She says she wants to make a deal with you.” Yuri kept his face blank, the practiced blank of a man who has learned not to own an opinion out loud.
No one comes to this building uninvited. Clients are summoned. Enemies are delivered. And now there was a third category entirely, a woman who had walked in and announced herself like a guest at a party she had not been invited to.
I do not make people wait because I am busy.
I make them wait because the waiting shows me who they are.
Most men sweat through it. A few rehearse.
I gave her ten minutes and walked out braced for one of the two, and I should have known by now that she does not arrive in the shapes other people come in.
I found her in the front room, perched on the arm of a chair worth more than her car, sunglasses pushed up into her hair.
She had already taken the measure of the place, weighing the art, clocking the exits, deciding what she might change if it were hers.
People in my world learn that survey young, and they learn it to stay alive. She seemed to do it for sport.
“What do you need?”
“No hello? No good morning?” She tilted her head. “Come on, oldie. Do not make your age this obvious.”
“Believe me,” I said, “I can have you carried out of here in under a minute.”
“You cannot do that to me.”
She said it like a fact rather than a hope. She was right, and I disliked how easily she had read that in me.
“Men.” I lifted two fingers toward the door.
She was off the chair and clamped to my forearm before the word finished landing. “Easy. I am joking.”
My men froze where they stood, six trained killers with no protocol for a woman draped over the boss like a borrowed coat. One of them glanced at me for an order. I had none to give him.
“You are touching me.”
“I noticed. You run warm for a glacier.” She did not let go. “Tell your goons to stand down, and I will tell you why I came.”
I waved them back. “Then talk.”
She released my arm and smoothed the sleeve where she had crushed it, a small domestic gesture that had no business anywhere near me. Then she squared her shoulders like a woman about to name her price.
“I want you to be my boyfriend.” A beat, just long enough to enjoy my face. “Pretend. Only for show.”
“No.”
She took the refusal without losing a step, the way a fighter rides a jab she has already counted on.
“Please.” Her grip tightened. “I am already drowning in one scandal, and you are the single man in this city I trust not to turn the arrangement into something he can sell. I am worn down from being paired with every breathing male who stands too close. I want one quiet stretch of life. Just consider it.”
I should have ended it there. I am very good at ending things. Instead I listened to my own voice ask the question that tells a man he is already negotiating.
“What is in it for me?”
“I knew you would ask that, and I came ready.” Her chin lifted.
“I asked Elena about you. She told me you keep an orphanage running on the west side. I will fund a full renovation, every last dollar, foundation to roof. I have a guest house standing empty that can hold all the children while the work is done.” She spread her hands. “So. Do we have a deal?”
I went still.
It was not because the offer was clever, though it was the cleverest thing anyone had set in front of me in years. It was because she had walked straight into the one room of my life I keep locked, and laid her terms on the only thing I have never managed to put a price on.
She could not have known. I grew up in a place much like the one I now pay to keep warm and fed, and I have never said that fact aloud to a living soul. Somehow she had aimed at the center of me without ever seeing the target.
For one ugly second I wanted to ask how she had found it when men who had known me for decades never had. Then I remembered she had found nothing. She had swung wide and gotten lucky, and luck is not the same as knowing.
“Is it so good it left you speechless?”
“I will think about it.”
A wiser man would have refused her twice and meant it. But she had named the one price I will always pay, and by the time she reached the door we both knew my answer, whatever I let my mouth say.
She threw both arms around my neck before I could move. “Yes. You are heaven sent.”
For half a second I let it stand, the unfamiliar weight of her against my chest, before sense came back to collect me.
“Get off me.”
She stepped back wearing a pout that would have undone a softer man.
“You are murdering the moment.” She swept up her bag.
“I have to run. My schedule is a war crime, and I have moved you to the top of it. Goodbye, grumpy oldie.” She rose onto her toes, kissed my cheek, and was through the door before I decided whether to be angry.
“Zoe.”
She stopped and looked back at me.
“Be careful. You might fall again.”
Her smile came slow and entirely too pleased with itself. “So might you.” She winked, and then she was gone, heels rapping down the corridor like applause.
I shook my head at the empty doorway. The brat had a talent for leaving a room louder than she had entered it.
Yuri reappeared, too well trained to smile and too human not to want to. I dared him with a look, and he vanished.
It should have irritated me more than it did, and that was the part I could not file correctly. Everything about her was built to grate. Somewhere between the parking garage and this morning the grating had turned into something I had no column for.
I returned to my desk and my three columns, and the numbers refused to stay where I set them.
I read one line four times over. Somewhere between the second pass and the third I understood I was not reading figures at all.
I was hearing the word orphanage in her mouth, the single moment all morning she had not been performing for anyone.
For most of my life, focus has been the one thing I could summon at will. It is how I stayed breathing while better men did not. Losing it over a kiss on the cheek and a deal I had not signed was not a problem I had a procedure for.
I asked Yuri for coffee and shut my eyes for a minute, the way I do before a deal I am unsure I should take.
Then I tried the window, the river, the long flat view that empties my head in seconds on any other day.
None of it held. The numbers sat there, patient and unbalanced, and for the first time in longer than I cared to measure, the work could not pull me back under.
When I lifted my phone to clear my head, it did the opposite. An interview she had given that same day sat at the top of my feed, the view count already climbing. I told myself I opened it for due diligence. I do not lie to myself often, so I let that one pass without comment.
The woman on the screen was not the one who had hung off my arm an hour earlier. The teasing was gone, every soft edge filed away. She faced a wall of reporters the way I face men who have come up short on a debt.
“I am so tired of this circus you keep building around me,” she said, and her voice never once climbed.
“What my relationship status is, or is not, falls entirely outside your concern. But since you insist on dragging the question into the light, here is your answer. From this day forward I am an open book about whoever I am seeing. You will have his name the moment there is a name worth giving. And hear this part clearly. I am not a bitch, a homewrecker, a slut, or anyone’s third party, because I respect women, and I have said as much more times than I can count.
So if you still believe otherwise, you are either stupid or impressively stupid.
I am far too beautiful and far too successful for this drama. ”
She turned and walked out of frame, leaving them shouting at the space where she had stood.
The cameras had no idea what to do with a woman who would not flinch. For one honest moment, neither did I.
Twenty years of reading people for the lie hidden under their words, and I could not find one in her. Whatever else she was, the fury on that screen was real, and so was the woman it had been built to protect.
I watched it a second time. I do not rewatch things.
There is nothing in a second viewing that the first has not already handed me, and I played it again anyway.
Somewhere in that second pass I caught myself smiling at the screen, an expression that sat so strangely I scrubbed it off the moment I felt it.
“She is a real fighter, that one.” Yuri had set the coffee down and lingered at my shoulder, a habit I would have to cure him of. “You have to admire the nerve on her.”
“Put it down and leave.” The edge in my own voice surprised me. There was no cause for it, none I was willing to name, beyond the fact that I did not care for the word admire in his mouth when it was aimed at her.
The deal made sense, and that was the trouble with it.
A renovation I could never have justified out of my own books, paid in full, in exchange for standing beside a beautiful woman at events I would have attended regardless.
On paper it was the easiest yes of my life.
I have learned to distrust the easy yes.
The rest of the day slid past me like traffic watched through glass. I signed what needed signing and approved what needed approval, and none of it reached the part of my mind a woman in sunglasses had quietly annexed, along with a renovation I had not agreed to fund.
That evening I ate alone, which is how I have always preferred it, a plate of good food and an apartment with no noise in it but mine. Then my phone lit with a number I had never saved, and I knew who it was before my thumb moved.
I let it ring three times, which is two more than I grant anyone.
“How did you get this number?”
“Elena. She likes me considerably more than she likes your privacy.” Half a second of pause. “So. Have you decided yet?”
“Can you not leave me in peace for one evening?”
“I am only asking.”
“Ask once more and I block this number.”
“You are no fun at all.” I could hear the grin riding under the words. “Goodnight, grumpy oldie.”
For a while afterward I told myself the renovation was the reason I let the call run as long as I did. It was not the renovation.
She hung up before I could. I set the phone face down on the table and watched my dinner go cold, and I admitted, only to myself and only for the space of a breath, that the apartment had been too quiet for years, and I had never noticed until a woman I did not want filled it with a single phone call.