Chapter 3
Samuel
Rows of identical desks stretched out, monitors dark and inert, chairs tucked neatly into their designated spaces.
The floor-to-ceiling glass walls of the corner conference rooms reflected faint, distorted slivers of the nascent dawn, turning the empty office into a fragmented mosaic of pale-blue and grey.
Even the air smelled different at this hour; less like people and ambition, more like industrial fabric cleaner and the faint, sharp trace of last night’s lemon-scented disinfectant.
This was the only time Samuel genuinely liked the office.
Before the day intruded with its demands and its noise.
He walked past the silent workstations, and headed toward the small kitchen tucked between two conference rooms. The space was barely larger than a walk-in closet; stainless-steel counters, a row of plain white mugs stacked upside down on a drying rack, and a high-end Italian coffee machine.
Samuel set down his leather briefcase and loosened the knot of his tie before selecting a mug.
He instinctively preferred the plain, unadorned black one; no corporate logos, no faux-inspirational quotes.
He placed it beneath the machine’s portafilter and initiated the brew cycle.
The aggressive whir of grinding beans sliced through the quiet, the rich, pungent smell of dark roast quickly expanding to fill the tight space.
This was another, more practical reason he came in early. No one hovered. No one tried to make inane chatter.
He picked up the steaming mug and headed toward his designated pod. He set the coffee down on a ceramic coaster, powered on his computer, and pulled his phone from his inner jacket pocket while the machine woke.
Two notifications glowed on the lock screen.
One from his private banker.
The other from his brother.
Drinks Saturday?
Sent at 11:23 p.m.
Samuel exhaled a slow breath through his nose.
His brother never clarified what kind of “drinks” he meant; which bar, which set of his increasingly chaotic friends, which country they might accidentally end up in by the end of the night.
Samuel had lost track of how many times these ostensibly casual outings had concluded with questionable photographs, lost jackets, or unexplained bruises.
The dumpster incident behind that pub in Chelsea had been particularly humiliating.
The impromptu trip to Montreal had been objectively worse.
Still, his thumb moved almost on its own, typing a single word in reply.
Yes.
Before he could second-guess the commitment, he locked the phone and set it facedown beside his monitor.
The computer had finished its boot sequence.
He took a slow sip of his coffee, the intense bitterness settling warmly into his chest, and opened his email.
The inbox had already accumulated a small, daunting mountain of messages: client updates, internal memos, flagged correspondences from two other partners, three separate requests for review from the litigation department, and a handful of messages marked “URGENT” that were very likely not urgent at all.
Samuel skimmed down the list with a practiced eye, mentally prioritizing and categorizing as he always did, a silent triage performed before the day's battles began.
Halfway through the scroll, his eyes paused.
From: Wise
Sent: 2:08 a.m.
Subject: RE: Case Materials—Immediate Prep Required
He frowned.
Two in the morning?
He double-clicked the email.
It opened into dense, structured paragraphs; significantly longer than previous assignments. The body of the message summarized a bitter corporate dispute, detailing discrepancies in decades-old contracts, allegations of deliberate asset misallocation, and a web of possible regulatory conflicts.
Samuel’s brow tightened as he read.
He clicked open the attachments.
His eyes widened a fraction. Dozens of separate files populated his screen. Filings, internal memos, poorly scanned contracts, expert analyses, complex financial models. Hundreds of pages of dense, cross-referenced information.
“Of course,” he muttered under his breath, the words dry and humorless.
He pushed his chair back slightly, and crossed one leg over the other as he took another, longer sip of coffee. He began to scroll through the first few pages, skimming headers, browsing footnotes, mentally cataloguing the sheer mass of what he was now expected to digest and master.
At the end of the email, a short, clipped note waited.
I expect a full analysis report on my desk by the end of the week.
— G.W.
Samuel stared at the line.
End of the week.
Which, as of this morning, meant effectively two days.
He let out a slow exhale, tilting his head back to stare at the ceiling. The soft, persistent hum of the overhead lights felt suddenly louder, more intrusive.
“Perfect,” he said, the word utterly dry.
He set the mug down and rolled his shoulders back, feeling the tension already coiling there.
This was going to be a long day.
∞∞∞
By the time the rest of the floor began to stir, Samuel had lost all conscious track of the hour.
The low, rhythmic click and sigh of the elevator doors became more frequent.
The overhead lights had fully brightened, chasing away the last lingering shadows, rendering every surface, every desk, crisp and precise.
Phones began their muted chiming. The large industrial printer near the south wall emitted its first high-pitched whine.
Distant, fragmented conversations bloomed and faded.
None of it registered to him as more than background texture.
Samuel barely moved.
His posture remained rigid, his eyes locked on the screen in front of him.
A dense, sprawling field of digital notes had colonized his monitor; sections highlighted in aggressive yellow and cautious blue, cross-referenced footnotes stacked vertically down the right-hand margin, arcane legal citations parsed and sorted into a sprawling taxonomy that only he could navigate.
Every time he blinked, the words seemed to swim. Every time he shifted minutely in his chair, the deep, persistent ache in his lower back intensified.
No one spoke to him.
Not directly. A few people passed by his pod; hurried associates, nervous interns, a junior partner who barely flicked a glance in his direction. Some exchanged brisk greetings amongst themselves.
But not a single voice was directed at him until 9:16 a.m.
It was Alina.
Her steps were light, but purposeful; he’d learned their distinct rhythm already, a cadence marked by the sensible tap of her low-heeled shoes and the soft, metallic jingle of a charm bracelet. He didn’t look up until she was nearly at his desk.
“Morning,” she said, her voice gentle.
He startled slightly, a full-body flinch, and looked up too quickly. “Hi… morning.”
She offered a small smile. Her gaze took one swift, comprehensive glance at the densely packed document on his screen, the empty coffee mug, the faint, red indentations along the side of his right hand where he’d been resting his weight too heavily on the laptop’s edge.
Her smile faded.
“I am not even going to ask. I’ll leave you to it,” she said, and turned away before he could fumble out something polite.
The hours after that blurred. They didn’t pass so much as fold into one another; an unbroken sequence of open tabs, legal citations, and flagged inconsistencies.
The screen’s brightness began to throb faintly behind his eyes.
His stomach tightened and released at odd intervals, a dull, hollow reminder he hadn’t consumed anything since the night before.
He considered getting up. Once. Maybe twice. The thought was a vague, distant signal his body was sending, a signal his mind consistently overrode.
But then another case note would pull him back under, a single clause that directly contradicted a claim buried two PDFs and fifty pages earlier. Each time he caught something, a sense of worth sparked in his chest; sharp and fleeting, like a match struck in a vast, dark room.
If he just worked harder, dug deeper, was more perfect, maybe…
He didn’t finish the thought.
Around 1:00 p.m., something shifted in his periphery, a subtle change in the light.
He hadn’t heard her approach. Not this time. There was no warning jingle.
Alina appeared beside his desk. She didn’t speak. She set something down on the empty space beside his keyboard; a square of white parchment paper, folded with neat corners around a thick sandwich, a single, thin paper napkin tucked underneath.
Samuel blinked, slow and disoriented. “Oh. Alina, thank you.”
His voice came out rough and hoarse from disuse.
She gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod, and moved on, continuing her path down the aisle before he could say more.
Samuel stared at the neatly wrapped sandwich. The rich smell of it reached him a second later; seedy bread, the faint tang of cheese, something green. His hands didn’t move toward it. It was enough that it was just there.
He murmured another soft thank you under his breath, though no one was there to hear it.
Then, slowly, he turned his stiff neck back to the screen.
∞∞∞
By 10:03 p.m., the office had descended into silence.
The world outside the glass walls had dissolved into a darkness hours ago; only the faint traces of distant skyscraper lights remained, refracted through the slightly smudged panes.
Most of the building’s occupants had vanished long before sunset, their absence leaving behind the soft hum of climate control and the dim, motion-sensor-triggered perimeter lights casting long shadows across the floor.
Samuel hadn’t noticed the quiet until this moment.
His body had long since stopped registering discomfort.
The persistent ache behind his eyes had settled into something diffuse.
His lower back protested with a dull throb every time he shifted his weight, but he’d stopped trying to stretch.
Even the sandwich Alina had brought him sat untouched and forgotten, its parchment wrapper now slightly flattened under the heavy casebook he’d set on top of it.
He didn’t hear the elevator chime.
But he did hear the footsteps.
Samuel’s head snapped up from the screen.
Mr. Wise stepped into the dimly lit aisle between the rows of dark workstations, his silhouette sharp-edged under the sparse overhead lighting.
He wasn’t carrying a briefcase. His overcoat was unbuttoned.
The way he moved suggested he had come here for a specific purpose, maybe a file he had forgotten to take that afternoon.
Their eyes met across the office.
Samuel stood up too quickly.
The chair legs scraped a faint sound against the carpet as his knees locked.
A dull headrush bloomed behind his eyes, swift and intrusive.
His hand shot out for the solid corner of the desk, his fingers catching himself on its cold edge.
His spine straightened on a reflex, every muscle pulling taut.
Gael didn’t speak.
He stood a full ten feet away, completely unmoving. His face was neutral, but there was something in the absolute stillness of it. Something quiet, assessing.
Samuel’s skin prickled, a wave of heat followed by a chill.
Not from fear. Something else.
He felt it as a distinct, physical sensation. The longer Gael stood there in silence, the heavier the air between them became. It filled the space like a barometric pressure dropping, and Samuel couldn’t help it; he shivered.
Barely. A near-imperceptible twitch across his shoulders.
Except it didn’t go unnoticed.
Gael’s gaze narrowed by the smallest, most precise degree, noting the reaction.
Then, without a single word, he turned. He walked away, his back to Samuel.
Samuel blinked, his throat tight. He didn’t sit back down right away.
His hand hovered over the back of his chair.
Something about the encounter felt jarringly incomplete.
Slowly, cautiously, he lowered himself into the seat.
His fingers curled over the cool plastic of the armrest as he tried, and visibly failed, not to glance back toward the now-empty aisle.
He frowned down at his own hands in his lap. They felt clammy and slightly uncooperative. He forced them back to the keyboard.
The screen was still waiting, the cursor blinking. And then, without warning, something slid across the edge of his vision.
A tall, clear glass. Filled with water. Beads of condensation forming on its surface.
Samuel startled violently. His head whipped up, his breath catching.
Gael stood there. Much closer now. Dangerously close. Beside his desk, his posture composed, his hand resting lightly on the top rim of the glass.
“Drink,” he said.
Samuel couldn’t look away. His eyes met Gael’s and locked there, caught in their dark stillness. His fingers moved before his thought could intervene. They wrapped around the cool, damp glass.
He lifted it, his movement slow and unsteady, and drank.
The water hit his parched throat colder than he’d expected. He swallowed once, a large gulp, then again. The heavy silence held. Gael remained exactly where he was, watching with an unnerving calm, that made hair on the back of Sam's neck stand to attention.
Samuel didn’t stop. He drank until the glass was empty.
Not because he was thirsty. But because something deep and instinctual said: this is what is expected.
He set the glass down only when it was completely empty.
His hand trembled slightly as he released it.
Gael’s voice came again. Low. Even. That same controlled cadence that made every word he spoke feel heavier than the last. “Good. Now pack your things and go home. Get some actual sleep.”
A deliberate, weighted pause.
“I expect you here, at your desk, on time in the morning. Tardiness is not tolerated. Is that understood?”
Samuel nodded, the motion sharp.
Gael didn’t move a muscle. “I expect a verbal response when I ask you a direct question, Mr. Ruiz.”
Samuel’s heart stuttered against his ribs. He straightened his spine instinctively, his back pulling into a rigid posture. His voice when it finally came, was quiet, slightly breathless. “Yes, Sir. Understood.”
Gael inclined his head. Just barely. A small flicker of something flew through his gaze, too quick for Sam to understand. Then he turned again, without another word, and walked away.
Samuel sat completely frozen in the palpable aftermath. The air around his desk still felt different. Charged. He stared at the empty, water-beaded glass.
And for one long, unguarded moment, he wondered what it was about Gael Wise that made his blood rush and mind go blank.