Chapter One – Maya
There aren’t many things that get cleaner with history. That’s what I’m telling myself when I walk into the offices of Storm and Associates. It’s one of the oldest consulting firms in town, upwards of 200 years, or so the legend goes. But it’s spotless. Every surface is either white or silver. Everything gleams. There are few hard edges because everything is space-aged and sleek. Even the chairs have unexpected curves. They look more like lozenges.
Nope. The march of time hasn’t put one spot of grime on this place. Now, the same cannot be said for its owner, Conrad Storm. He’s got a reputation as a billionaire playboy that makes Bruce Wayne look like a shy, fumbling teenager. Conrad Storm, or so the legend goes, is richer than God, the most gorgeous of God’s creations, does not believe in God, and has a bottomless appetite for women.
A dirty man in this clean place, in other words.
So why, oh why, did I get invited to apply for a job here? I’m hot and I know it, but there’s hot and there’s otherworldly. Like, say, the woman working the reception desk. Blond. Maybe eight feet tall, which I can tell even though she’s sitting down. Legginess is a state of mind as well as a measurement. She looks like she stepped out of a magazine, airbrushed, but here she is, in person. She’s sizing me up. It’s what we do. But she knows she’s got me beat on this one. It’s no surprise at all to see that her name is Zima. It was always going to be something like that.
“Can I help you?” she says in the bored, slightly wary tone of voice that makes me feel like I wandered in wearing a garbage bag and pushing a shopping cart.
“Yes, I have an appointment for—”
“Send her up please, Zima.”
Hmm. The voice that filters into the room isn’t like the usual robotic voices you hear on the phone menus when you call to pay an overdue bill. It seems to come from everywhere. It’s warm, unmistakably male, and commanding. Zima, a couple of women sitting on the lozenges in the waiting room, and I all sit up a little straighter and start fiddling with our hair. It occurs to me that these other women might be here to fight for what I’m already thinking of as my job. Even though I have no idea what the job is. I was at home a week ago when my phone buzzed. A text. “We are interested in interviewing you for a position at Storm and Thorston.” It listed an address and a time. That was it.
“Right away, Conrad,” says Zima to the ceiling. Or maybe she’s looking up at Heaven. Conrad’s rich enough that he may be a majority owner in Heaven at this point.
Zima glares at me. She jerks her head at the elevator door that is suddenly opening in the wall. She jerks her head with such venom and force that her hair whips around and covers her face. Feeling a satisfaction that I haven’t done anything to earn, I walk to the elevator, enjoying the fact that everyone is watching me get on so I can…well, what exactly, I don’t know.
The elevator doors close behind me. Well, this is weird as hell. There aren’t any buttons in here. Maybe this was a huge joke and will be my version of being buried alive. I’ll never get out of this elevator and those women in the lobby will get my job and Zima will laugh and laugh. I’ve got to keep it together. He’s probably watching. With that thought, I use the reflective surfaces of the silver walls to do one last mirror check. I chose a gray dress with sharp lapels and a small red sweater on top. My black hair is cut into a modern bob that always delights my hairdresser. He says I’m his favorite and it might even be true. I’ve got a subtle but commanding shade of red lipstick on and the whole package is nicely offset by my pale skin. This is probably the best I’ve ever looked. I know everyone says that when they’re 25, and it’s usually true, but it’s really true today.
Anyway, if I don’t get the job, at least I know it’s not because I dressed wrong.
The elevator is moving. That means someone is controlling it. That someone is probably Conrad. This means that he gets to choose where I get off. And that unfortunate phrase, “get off,” reminds me of the latest bit of Conrad press that hit the Internet. He had gotten pulled over for speeding. The details as to what happened next are unclear, but what was happening two minutes later is as clear as it gets. The cop was a woman named Cindy. Conrad tempted her into his car and they started making out where he was parked on the shoulder. They were there for so long that another cop car pulled over to see if a fellow officer was in danger. That poor—albeit satisfied—woman is now under investigation by her own department. “Why didn’t you show some self-control?” they keep asking her in interviews. And every time, she smiles and says, “You’d have to be there.”
She doesn’t seem sorry in the slightest, even after she lost her job for her refusal to admit she acted unprofessionally. Whatever he said to her, whatever he did to her…it was all worth it to her. She also seems totally crazy, which has kept everyone glued to the TV when she’s going to be on.
Conrad’s response was simple. “It was part of an experiment.”
That’s when the elevator doors open silently. I’m looking out onto an expanse of white carpet so vast that I feel like I might go snowblind. The office is so big it feels like a joke. Way down there at the end of the enormous office is a desk. Sitting behind the desk is a man in a dark gray suit.
I don’t have the best eyesight in the world, but even from this distance, I can tell two things.
One: he’s as gorgeous in person as he is on camera.
And two: he’s grinning like I just stepped into a trap.
“Come in,” he says, and it doesn’t feel like I have a choice. I ponder, for exactly two seconds, how I might stay in the elevator and get out of here, but there still aren’t any buttons. Anyway, I can’t let him see how nervous I am.
As if I own this building, this firm, the world, and everything in between, I walk towards him with my shoulders back. You don’t scare me. I try to make it obvious in every step. But as he grins wider and wider, it’s obvious that he knows exactly what effect he’s having on me.