Every man I kiss dies

The building took up an entire block of downtown, forty floors of black glass that reflected the sky so perfectly it looked less like architecture and more like a held breath. Elena stood across the street from it for a full minute before she made herself cross, watching the doors swallow a steady stream of people in expensive suits, none of them glancing twice at the building the way she had, like they'd long since stopped noticing how strange it was to work somewhere that looked like it belonged in a different decade of the future.

The card in her pocket felt heavier than a piece of paper had any right to feel.

She told herself she was there for answers, not because Adrian Vale's driver had left his card tucked into her coat pocket with an address and a floor number, and not because she'd spent the entire previous night replaying the sound the shadow had made when it broke.

The lobby alone made her feel underdressed. Marble floor, a security desk staffed by three people who all looked like they could end a fight before it started, and a wall of glass etched with the company's name in silver, tasteful and enormous at the same time.

"I'm here to see Adrian Vale," she said, and felt ridiculous saying it, like she was a delivery instead of a person he'd told to come.

The woman at the desk didn't ask who she was. "Mr. Vale is expecting you. Forty second floor."

The elevator was silent and fast enough that her ears popped. When the doors opened, she stepped into a different world, glass walled offices, people moving with the clipped urgency of a company that didn't waste time, and at the far end, through an open door, Adrian.

He was not the man from the parking lot.

He stood at the head of a conference table, sleeves rolled to the forearm, addressing six people who were listening to him the way soldiers listen to someone who has kept them alive before. His voice carried without being raised. Whatever he was saying made two of the people at the table go pale, and none of them so much as glanced away from him while he spoke.

Elena hadn't meant to walk in. She'd meant to wait, but the door was open and her feet had a mind of their own, and by the time she realized her mistake, every head in the room had turned toward her.

Adrian's expression didn't change, but something in the room did. "We're finished," he said, to the table, not to her, and the six people filed out past her without a word, none of them meeting her eyes, as though looking at her might be a mistake too.

"I didn't mean to interrupt."

"You did," he said. "It's fine."

"They looked terrified of you."

"They should be. I hold their mistakes to a higher standard than most employers." He walked toward her, and she was suddenly, uncomfortably aware of how the room's size didn't matter, how he still managed to take up all the space in it. "You came."

"I almost didn't. Twice on the walk over I told myself this was insane, that I should turn around and go home and pretend yesterday hadn't happened."

"What stopped you?"

"You did. Or the version of you that threw something invisible across a parking lot like it weighed nothing. I couldn't unsee that even if I wanted to."

Something almost like amusement crossed his face, there and gone. "What were you telling them?" she asked. "Before I walked in."

"That two of them nearly lost a client's protection detail to a threat they should have flagged three days earlier." His tone was even, but there was steel underneath it. "In my line of work, mistakes like that get people killed. I don't have the patience to pretend otherwise for the sake of morale."

"Is that how you talk to everyone who works for you?"

"Only the ones I expect better from."

"You said you'd give me answers."

"I said you'd get them. I didn't say today would be painless."

"I don't care about painless. I care about..." She stopped. Something on her collarbone had begun to burn, a slow spreading heat under her skin, and when she looked down, a mark was rising there, thin dark lines curling like the beginning of a symbol she didn't recognize and had never seen on her own body before.

"Elena." Adrian's voice had changed entirely, every trace of the boardroom gone out of it.

"What is that?" Her hands were shaking again.

He crossed the last of the distance between them and reached for her, two fingers under her jaw, tilting her head to see the mark better. His touch was warm, careful, and completely at odds with the sharp focus in his eyes. Around them, the office kept moving, phones ringing, someone laughing two doors down, entirely unaware of what was happening in the room they'd all just left.

"Don't move," he said quietly.

"You're scaring me."

"Good. You should be scared." His thumb traced the edge of the mark without touching it directly, and Elena felt something under her skin respond to the nearness of his hand, a pull she had no name for, warm and strange and entirely unwelcome given everything else happening around her.

"This shouldn't be here yet," he murmured, more to himself than to her.

"Yet? What does that mean?"

Adrian's jaw tightened. Whatever he saw in the symbol, he wasn't going to say it standing in an office with the door open, that much was clear in the sudden, deliberate way he stepped back from her, putting careful distance between them like he needed it more than she did.

"I know this mark," he said finally. "I haven't seen it in three hundred years."

"Then tell me what it means."

"Not here." He glanced past her, toward the hallway, toward the people still moving through the office like the world hadn't just tilted sideways. "My office. Now."

Elena followed him past the glass walls and the ringing phones, aware of every eye that tracked their movement, aware of the mark still burning faintly under her collar. She didn't tell him about the text message yet. She wanted to see if he'd bring up the last woman who wore her face before she had to ask.