Chapter 6
Jace
The orchid was the first thing I saw when I walked into my office Tuesday morning. A Phalaenopsis, white with pale violet streaks, sitting on the table near the window where the light caught its petals.
Someone had placed it there deliberately, angled it so the blooms faced the door, so I’d see it the moment I walked in.
I had about four seconds to register that it was beautiful before my sinuses declared war.
The sneeze came out of nowhere, so hard my glasses nearly flew off my face and hit the desk.
My eyes flooded. My chest seized. I grabbed the edge of my desk because my throat was already swelling and my lungs were tightening and through the watery blur I could see the orchid sitting there, innocent and lovely, its pollen already circulating through my ventilation system like a biological weapon.
"Who put that there?" I wiped my eyes with the back of my gloved hand and tried to breathe through a throat that was narrowing by the second.
Anna appeared in the doorway. She was smiling—wide, warm, and with a hint of something that said she was waiting to be thanked.
"I did." Her chin lifted. "I read that you collect orchids, so I thought…"
"You thought." My eyes were still streaming, which undercut whatever authority I was trying to project. "You thought you’d bring a plant into my sealed, climate-controlled office without asking."
"I was trying to be nice."
"Nice." The tightness in my chest wasn’t just the allergic reaction anymore. It was the memory of a space too small. Walls too close. Air too thick. That memory didn’t ask permission. It arrived when it wanted, and when it arrived, everything else went to hell.
"Get it out," I said.
"Mr. Hunter, I really was just…"
"I said get it out. Now. Take it and go."
"I didn’t know you were allergic. I’m sorry…"
"I collect them at home." I braced one hand against the desk.
Drew a breath that didn't come easy. "In a separate room.
With a filtered air system." Another breath.
My voice was thinning. "Because I am severely allergic to the pollen.
" I pulled my glasses off to wipe my eyes and felt my hand shake before I pressed them back into place.
"Which you would know if you'd bothered to ask before deciding to improve my environment without my consent. "
"I-I’ll take it out, I’m deeply s-sorry." She pulled back with a small retreat of the shoulders. I should have stopped there.
"You have been here less than two weeks," I said, and my voice was cold in a way I recognized, "and in that time you have spilled coffee on me, assaulted me with your mouth, vomited on me, and now you’re trying to send me into anaphylaxis. Is there a plan here? A timeline? Should I prepare a will?"
She didn't say anything. Her expression shifted—confused to hurt in the space of a breath—and she grabbed the orchid with both hands and turned for the door.
Fast. But not fast enough. I caught her eyes before she got her face pointed away from me.
She held the pot against her chest and walked out. The door closed behind her.
The office went quiet.
I stood there. My sinuses still burning, my chest still tight, and a feeling settling into my stomach that had nothing to do with allergies.
I knew what guilt felt like. I'd carried it most of my life in one form or another. And this one came from watching someone's face change because of words I'd designed to cut—because cutting was easier than explaining that I was afraid.
I hated making women cry. Not in some abstract, civilized way. With a raw, gut-deep revulsion rooted in a sound I couldn’t unhear. My mother, weeping through the walls of our London townhouse when I was ten. Catherine thought the walls were thick enough. They weren’t.
I lay in bed and listened, night after night, and understood, even then, that she was crying because of what happened to me.
The woman who used to paint seascapes and laugh with her whole body now cried in the dark and took pills to sleep—because her son had been taken from a school parking lot and held in a basement for eleven days.
And even though he came back, something didn’t come back with him.
I made Anna Wilson cry and the sound my mother made was playing on repeat in my skull.
I took the antihistamine from my desk drawer. Swallowed it dry. Sat down. Picked up the Rubik’s cube. Click, click, click. Twenty-two seconds. Seven off average. My hands were wrong.
Miles walked in without knocking. He looked at me, then at the empty spot on the table where the orchid had been, then back at me.
"Anna just walked past my office holding a plant and crying. What happened?"
"She brought an orchid into the office."
Miles closed his eyes for a second. "I should have put the allergy in her briefing pack," he said. "That’s my fault. The last assistants already knew, so I got lazy with the paperwork." He rubbed the back of his neck. "But that’s not why she was crying, is it?"
I didn’t answer.
"Jace." He waited until I looked at him. "She didn't know. She was trying to do something nice for you. That's all it was."
He pulled a chair over and sat down across from me. Not too close. He always knew exactly how much room I needed.
"I know what happens when your chest gets tight." His voice dropped, steady and unhurried. "I know where your head goes."
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
"And I know that when you're scared, you get mean, because mean makes people leave, and people leaving is the only thing that makes you feel safe."
He held my gaze. Patient. Like he'd said some version of this before and would say it again as many times as it took.
"But she's not a threat, Jace. She's a woman who bought you a flower."
I looked at the cube in my hands. Turned it once. The colors blurred.
"You don’t have to like her," Miles said. "You don’t even have to be nice. But you can’t keep doing this."
He stood. The door closed, and I was alone.
I sat with the cube for another thirty seconds. Then I put it down.
"Bloody hell."
I stood. Walked out of my office. Crossed the floor.
The entire room went quiet. Heads turned. Every pair of eyes tracking me, and I hated it, the exposure, the visibility.
"Where did Ms. Wilson go?" I asked the first employee I reached, a woman from the art department whose name I knew was Priya even though she probably didn’t know I knew.
She looked at me like I’d asked for directions to the moon. Because in seven years, I had never crossed this floor looking for another person. "She was walking toward the elevator," she said. "Maybe five minutes ago."
I walked to the elevator bank, pressed the button to open before the door could close.
She was inside. Far corner. Arms crossed over her chest. Eyes red.
I stepped in.
Her gaze came up. Met mine. She said nothing, just watched as I walked in and stood on the opposite side, maximum distance, like we were two magnets with the same charge.
The doors closed. The elevator started moving.
I wanted to say something. I didn’t know what. Apologies weren’t something I’d had much practice with. People didn’t stay long enough to earn one, and I’d never cared enough to offer. I opened my mouth.
Suddenly the elevator jolted and the lights died.
Darkness. Total darkness. It consumed me whole. I felt the weight against my skin, inside my lungs. The walls pressed closer. My hands shot out and hit cold metal on both sides, and the elevator wasn't an elevator anymore. It was a box. Sealed, lightless, and shrinking.
My body knew before my brain caught up. Heart rate through the roof. Breathing gone. The air was disappearing the way it always did in my memory of the basement, tasting like concrete dust and the sweat of two men who didn’t care that I was only eight years old and couldn’t stop shaking.
My fingers found the Rubik’s cube in my pocket.
Started turning. Click, click. But my hands were shaking too badly.
The cube slipped, hit the elevator floor, the sound ricocheting off the walls, and I was gone.
Back in the basement. The door locked. The men upstairs.
Nobody coming. Nobody was coming to save me.
No one came for eleven days. I didn’t know that yet, but my body did. My body remembered every hour, every zip tie, every second of waiting in the dark for someone who wasn’t there.
My knees gave out. I went down hard, palms flat against the elevator floor—cold, gritty, every surface a catalog of contamination my brain couldn't stop running even now.
Hundreds of shoes a day. Bacteria. Everything I spent my life avoiding, pressed right into my skin.
But that voice was small and far away, drowned out by the rest of it.
The dark. The walls. Each breath shorter than the last. And the certainty, bone-deep, that I was going to die in this box the way I was supposed to die in that one.
"Mr. Hunter."
A voice. Far away, like hearing someone through concrete.
"Mr. Hunter. Jace."
She called for me again. "Jace. I need you to hear me. Can you hear me?"
My name. The voice saying it was calm in a way that didn't belong in the dark, didn't belong anywhere near the basement or the men or the sound of heavy footsteps on concrete stairs.
But it was there. Warm. Getting closer, like someone walking toward me through the worst thing I'd ever lived through without being afraid of it.
Small fingers against my jaw, cool against the sweat on my skin. Her hand was steady, and I could feel my own pulse hammering against her palm.
Every nerve in my body fired. Twenty-four years of wiring snapping awake at once, and suddenly I wasn't in the elevator anymore.
A hand closing around a boy's neck in the dark, squeezing until the air stops and the edges of everything go black. And after—his mother finds the bruises days later. Pressing her face into her hands and crying while she thought he was sleeping.
But this hand didn’t grip. It rested against my jaw, so light I could barely feel it.
And it smelled like vanilla.
Vanilla wasn't in the basement. Vanilla was a Saturday morning at a market. A woman who called me a pervert and meant it. Lips that tasted sweet when they crashed into mine. Hands held up, fingers spread, showing me they were clean. Her voice, drunk and absurd, telling me her chest was harmless. Soft like clouds. That they couldn’t hurt anyone.
Vanilla was safe. My brain grabbed that classification and held on with everything it had.
"Breathe with me," she said. Her voice was close, close enough that I could feel her exhale warm against my skin.
"In. One. Two. Three. Four."
She breathed with me. Slow, steady, loud enough for me to follow in the dark. Either she'd done this before, or she was pretending she had. The pretending was good enough.
"In. One. Two. Three. Four."
I tried. The air came in jagged, thin and not enough.
"Out. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six."
Her hand stayed on my jaw. Her other hand found mine on the floor. She didn’t grab it. She just placed her fingers over mine, barely touching, giving me the option to pull away.
I didn’t pull away.
"Again. In. One. Two. Three. Four."
She counted. I breathed. The basement receded. Inch by inch, like a tide going out, the walls pushed back to where they belonged and the air thinned and my lungs remembered how to work. Her voice was the anchor. The only fixed point in a darkness that was trying to swallow me whole.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that. Minutes. Maybe longer. Her counting, me breathing, both of us sitting on the floor of a broken elevator in the dark.
Then the lights came back.
Fluorescent white, blinding after the black. I blinked, then squinted. The elevator was small, ordinary, and definitely not a basement. The doors were still closed. The maintenance alarm was beeping somewhere above us.
I was on the floor, shirt damp with sweat, glasses fogged, and hands trembling.
Then something trickled from my nostril.
A stream of red, down my lip, onto my white shirt. I touched my face, and my fingers came back red and wet, and the sight of my own blood made my stomach roll.
She moved fast. Tissues from her bag. She pressed one to my nose, gentle but firm, and her other hand went to the back of my neck to hold me steady. Her fingers were warm against my skin. Bare skin. No gloves between us. No barriers.
I should have pulled away. Every protocol I’d built for myself, every wall, every rule, said pull away. Don’t let strangers touch you. Don’t let anyone this close.
But I sat on the floor of a broken elevator and let Anna Wilson hold my face, touch my neck with her bare hands, and I didn’t even flinch.
My heart was doing something new. Not the panicked hammering from before. Something lighter. Uneven. A rhythm I didn’t recognize and couldn’t pinpoint.
The bleeding stopped. She pulled back and looked at her hands. Her fingers were smeared with my blood. She was staring at me with an expression I couldn’t read, half concern, half something shaken, like she’d just seen something she wasn’t prepared for and was still deciding what to do with it.
The elevator doors opened.