Chapter 2 - Fiona

With my headphones on, I type in another sequence of commands and sigh when it doesn't go through. I don't know why I can't get it to work. I have lo-fi blaring and looked up the commands three times, but I can't find a single bug in the line of code.

If I can't get this stupid thing to work, I will have to go through and rename every file in the folder, which will actually take me the rest of the night. I already know Olive isn't going to help me at all.

"Bitch!" someone yells right as the song on my headphones changes, and I jump, looking up to see Olive standing there, laughing so hard that there are tears rolling down her face. I take my headphones off and roll my eyes at her.

"Keep doing that," I say, swinging my feet up onto the desk. "And you'll fuck up that makeup."

And , I think, my hand still relaxing from how my body launched into fighting mode, I might accidentally knock you out.

"Yeah right," she says, glancing at herself in her phone's reflection. "This setting spray was made by the fucking astronauts, okay? Not a single thing on my face is moving."

"Speaking of your makeup," I say, raising my eyebrows, "why do you look that?"

"Like what?"

"You look like you're going to a rave, but we have—" I stop when I see the look on her face, dropping my feet down from the desk and sliding my desk around the side. From this vantage point, I can see her sparkling, skin-tight dress. "Oh, no, Olive! You promised. You can't go to a fucking rave tonight, dude."

"Babes, the party waits for nobody. Especially not me."

"Olive, there are 849 files in this folder that have to be renamed. That's going to take me all night."

"I thought you waved your magic wand and fixed it all at once?" she asks, popping her gum and tapping out something quickly on her phone. "That little typing thing you do."

"The code isn't being kind to me tonight," I say, flinching when I realize I sound like a complete nerd. "But that's not the point—you said you were going to work tonight! So I could go home early."

"Fiona, my sweet, sexy best friend," Olive says, when she realizes I'm not kidding. She looks me up and down, and I cross my arms, not willing to budge on this one. Not a chance. She drops the smile, quirking an eyebrow. "Four bags of Twizzlers."

My mouth waters.

"I resent the fact that you think you can buy me with—"

"Four bags of Twizzlers, those gummy Nerds that you like, that two cases of that craft soda shit."

"What flavor?

"…root beer?"

"Fuck," I mutter, thinking about two whole cases of my favorite drink—which normally runs at four dollars a can. Olive can afford to throw money like that around because she and her entire family are stinking rich. For me, a four-dollar drink is dinner. For her, it's something to hold while she circles a room, only to be left, a single sip taken, warm and flat, on the counter for someone's maid to dump down the drain the next morning.

"Thank you," Olive squeals, taking tiny steps over to me in her high heels. "You're literally the best friend in the entire fucking world."

"Is that why you invited me to the rave with you?"

"I know you hate that shit," she mutters, rolling her eyes. It's true. I don't like going with her to the clubs because it feels too open—too many people with access to me. It's hard to stay vigilant when your ears are bombarded by electronica. "But are we on for the new season of Bridgerton this weekend?"

"Make it three cases. And you can Doordash me some food here now since I have to sit here all night without you."

"I have to bribe you to watch TV with me now?" Olive asks, but she smiles as she taps on her phone. "Done. But you have to bring the popcorn."

I put my hand over my heart like I'm hurt as she blows me kisses and turns, hobbling out of the room. When she's gone, I feel like a little bug in a big cage. I can hear the individual buzz of every single fluorescent light in the room, and it sends a shiver down my back.

Every day, I have to remind myself that just because I was raised to assume every noise is a threat, that doesn't mean it's true.

Taking a deep breath, I grab my headphones. I pop my fingers, crack my neck, and settle in for a long night in front of this damn computer screen.

When I started interning for Olive's dad, Mr. Allard, four months ago, I thought I was going to be gaining valuable skills that I could transfer to other workplaces, as the job listing claimed. Instead, I'm left doing the stupid organizational tasks that you can't pay anyone else enough to do. They would literally poke their eyes out from boredom. But I'm chasing the carrot on the stick—the kind of security that Olive and her dad enjoy from their money, so I'm here, renaming 849—now 844—files in the company folder that may never even be opened again.

After a while, time starts to go by quickly. I play one of my favorite podcasts to pass the time—this chick who talks about makeup and crime—and I start glancing around the room, feeling like someone is watching me.

That's what I get for listening to a crime podcast while sitting alone in the world's creepiest office. I try to picture what it looks like when everyone is here, bustling around. I think about Tony, the other intern, who is constantly flirting with Olive, then defaulting to talking about me when Olive forgets that he exists.

I don't use my Friday nights to do the things I want to do—not since this internship started. Instead, I do Olive's work and my work while she plays with all the other gorgeous socialites at the parties downtown. If it weren't for our more than six years of friendship at this point, I'd be worried that she doesn't actually like me.

But the truth is that underneath all that makeup and her vapid little princess act, Olive is a nerd at heart, like me. Addicted to her romance books and stupid for Orlando Bloom in The Lord of the Rings. And I'm the only person in the world she feels comfortable showing that to.

In the dark, in the middle of the night, Olive and I talk about what it's like to be a living thing, breathing air, with the knowledge that someday you'll no longer exist. During the day, she pretends to forget, on repeat.

I don't understand it, but I don't need to. Our friendship works just fine for me.

When I hear something from the other side of the room, my heart drops into my stomach, and I pull the headphones off my head. I always get jumpy like this in the middle of the night and try to tell myself it's probably nothing when the noise comes again.

I hear my father's voice in the back of my head, the voice that I've tried to hard to leave behind. And he's telling me that I can sit here like a doe in the headlights, or I can confront what's scaring me.

"What the fuck?" I whisper, just to hear something in the silence. My hands start to shake, adrenaline coursing through my body. When the noise happens again, I remember that Olive ordered me some food and I let out a breathy laugh to myself, standing and trying to shake the jitters from my hands.

"Hey!" I shout, because the shouting makes me feel better. "Dude, she didn't tell you the code?"

I walk over to the door, punching the code in so it doesn't set off the alarm. It's weird that Olive didn't put the code in the app, tell them to punch it in, and leave it on the table in the lobby, but she could have already been pre-gaming by the time she left here.

"Hello?" I ask when I open the door, but I'm looking out at an empty slab of concrete where a delivery guy should be standing. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There's something wrong with this situation. I close the door quickly, turning around and pressing my back to it, looking up and down the hallway, my heart thumping quickly in my chest.

You're being paranoid , I tell myself, willing myself to take a step forward, back toward my desk. Some people call it being paranoid. Some people call it being raised by a marine with plenty of PTSD and a survival complex.

Slowly, my eyes sweeping back and forth through the office, I walk back to my desk, but I don't put my headphones back on. I reach down to the drawer of my desk, grabbing the mace and taser I keep there. I set the mace on the desk and keep the taser in my right hand, finger twitching over the button.

I stare at the screen, trying to look like I'm doing something.

Tomorrow morning, I'll feel silly about all this. For the hour I spent sitting at the desk, taser in hand, thinking someone was in the office with me. But right now, it feels too real.

I'm just about to put the taser away when I hear a sound across the room again, and I spin around, seeing a man—huge and muscular—standing between the desks.

Jesus fucking Christ—this is actually happening. My body freezes.

Eighteen years of training and preparation rises in me, like a robot that's heard it's command code. For years, I've been trying to shake away my dad's incessant paranoia, telling myself I would never need to use hand-to-hand combat.

But now, here I am, in exactly the kind of situation my father prepared me for.

"Well, hello princess," he says, and I leap up from the chair, grabbing the mace and pointing the taser at him, pressing the button but—faulty. Nothing happens.

I growl in frustration as he laughs and turn on my heel, running for the door. The mace is in my hand, I should point it at him, spray it on him, but I can't get my body to stop running away.

My feet slap loudly against the tile floor, and I mutter a curse under my breath. These damn Converse don't have the right support for running from a bad guy in the middle of the night. I let out the kind of deranged laugh that can only come from a low-paid intern running on two energy drinks and a bag of cold fries at lunch.

I reach out for the door, my fingertips brushing it, when something grabs the back of my hoodie and pulls, choking me and yanking me on my ass. My body reacts without my thinking—all those hours of training with my dad kicking in—and I roll with the motion, going backward over my head when I hit the ground and popping onto my feet a moment later.

"What the fuck?" the guy asks, his mouth dropping open as he looks at me.

"My thoughts exactly," I breathe, before spraying him with the mace. The second it hits his face, I run past him, but that means it hits my face, too, and we're both running, coughing, and sputtering. I can hear his footsteps behind me, and I realize I only have one place to go if I'm running in this direction.

I burst out onto the roof, heaving the fresh night air, trying to clear my lungs of the painful pepper spray. My eyes are watering so much it's hard to see straight, but it's got to be much worse for my bad guy, who's swearing enough to make a dozen grandmothers faint behind me.

"Woah," he says, holding his hands up when he gets to the top of the roof. "What the hell are you doing? No need to jump—"

"What?" I ask, confused, until I turn and realize I'm right on the edge of the roof. I gasp in a breath and lurch away from it.

And right into the bad guy's arms.

"Got you," he says, almost playfully, and I smirk at him before growling low in my throat and swinging my arm.

I catch him under the chin and get that stupid mask off his face.

With a strong jaw and the faintest five o'clock shadow, he looks like he'd be on the cover of an action movie. His eyes are dark blue in a way that almost looks photoshopped, captivating, and deep. I can almost hear Olive in my head calling them fuck me eyes.

He's handsome if you're the kind of crazy who takes time to admire the man who is—what? Tormenting you? Breaking and entering? I realize I don't actually know what his intentions are. If he was going to kill me, surely he could have just shot me by now. He looks like the kind of man who would have a gun.

The podcast I was just listening to comes back to me, and I think of her words.

The most skilled, prolific serial killers are handsome. It's how they get their victims to lower their defenses. We automatically trust handsome people.

After a moment, I realize he's just holding me, and we're just breathing hard, looking into each other's eyes like this is a rom-com. As if on impulse, I jerk my leg, kneeing him hard in the nuts and jerking away from him when he curses, stumbling back.

But he's too fast. He sticks his leg out, tripping me and sending me sprawling across the rooftop, which is like the worst mix of concrete and gravel. I wince and hiss through my teeth when I feel the little pieces of gravel embedded in my skin.

" Fuck ," I say, rolling onto my back, just in time to see my bad guy coming to stand over the top of me. He reaches out a hand to me, and I can't help but laugh at the gesture. He's laughing, too. We are both insane.

When I get to my feet, he smiles at me, then puts a chloroform rag over my mouth, pressing down with a surprising gentleness.

The strangest part is that I don't fight back. For some reason, I'm curious. I want to know who this man is, what he's doing, and where he's going to take me. I meet his eyes as I breathe in the fumes, feeling my body slowly relax.