Page 11 of The Associate
Gael’s gaze swept over the three of them, his eyes holding no hint of amusement or patience.
“Are you finished chitchatting?”
His tone was flat.
Alina closed her mouth immediately, any further explanation clearly abandoned. George shifted his weight, a barely-there adjustment as he tried, and failed, to project an air of unbothered composure.
“We were just…” Alina began, her voice carefully measured, but Gael’s gaze slid to her and she let the sentence die, her pleasant expression fading into something blank.
He turned his head slightly toward George, “Bring the Kincaid deposition notes to my office. Now.”
George’s smirk returned instantly, “Of course, Mr. Wise.” He shot Samuel a quick, sidelong look before reaching across his desk to grab a thick, red-rope file.
The moment they were out of sight, Alina let out a quiet breath. She reached out and rested a gentle hand on Samuel’s shoulder.
“Don’t mind him,” she murmured, her voice low. “Gael’s… a lot. But once you get used to his style, he’s not as terrifying as he seems.”
Samuel managed a stiff, jerky nod, but his throat was still too tight to form any words.
The fragile warmth he’d felt only moments earlier had drained away entirely, leaving a familiar, cold tension settling deep into his muscles and beneath his skin.
Chapter 3
Samuel
Samuel stepped out of the elevator at 5:42 a.m., the soft, metallic chime echoing with unnatural clarity down the silent hallway. The lights on the sixteenth floor hadn’t yet warmed to their daytime intensity; the long, rectangular panels glowed a muted, cool white, still humming as they powered up, leaving the outer edges of the open-plan office swallowed by long, deep shadows. Without the constant, layered noise of keyboards, footsteps, and muted phone conversations, the space felt cavernous and hollow.
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, orunexplained 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.
