The elevator doors at Blackwell Capital closed like a verdict.
Mirrored chrome, gold numbers, my face in triplicate. My palms were damp around the folder that contained my entire future: internship offer, NDA, a schedule printed by a nervous HR assistant at 1:17 a.m. I could still smell the toner. I could still hear my mother's voice from last night—Don't make waves, Ella. It's three months. Smile, take notes, go home.
The elevator stopped on 37. Someone stepped in.
He didn't belong to morning. He looked like midnight after the last cocktail party—tie loose, jaw set, authority like a second suit. Tall enough that the elevator seemed to adjust itself around him. One hand in his pocket, the other holding a phone as if phones should be grateful to be held by him.
Our reflections multiplied until I was surrounded by a dozen versions of this man, each one cut from a headline.
Adrian Blackwell.
I recognized him painfully late—after I'd already stared a beat too long—and he noticed. Of course he did. His eyes flicked over me like a scanner, and I could almost hear the click: girl, nineteen, cheap heels, shake in left hand, ambition in right.
The doors closed. The elevator swam upward.
"Department?" he asked without looking up, voice deep enough to echo.
"Corporate affairs," I managed. "Intern." Then I added, because I hated how small that sounded, "Ella Carter."
He slid the phone into his pocket the way most people sheathe a knife. "Carter." He tasted the syllables as if checking them for poison. "First day, or are we doing a do-over?"
"First day," I said, then—God save me—tried a joke. "I hear it's good to start at the bottom."
One corner of his mouth lifted like a sunrise that changed its mind. "This is forty floors above bottom."
"Then I'm ahead," I whispered.
His eyes dropped to the folder I was strangling. "You're shaking."
"I'm not."
"You are." He leaned back and hit the button for the top floor with a casual, proprietary gesture. "Here's free advice, Ms. Carter: no one in this building has time for nerves. If you can't make your hands stop, make your voice do it."
"Nerves imply I care," I said, too fast.
He turned to me for the first time, fully. The world got quiet in that way it does just before something explodes. "And do you?"
"Care?" I let myself meet his gaze, even though it felt like staring into a storm. About what you think of me? Not yet.
Two beats. Three. The elevator hummed. His mouth did the almost-smile again, as if somewhere on another floor an investment just went his way.
"Good answer," he said, and then the doors opened into a lobby of glass and air and the kind of art that costs more than a house.
[…]
Hours later, after the investor call, after I'd blurted truths no intern should, after I'd proven I could stand in a fire without asking where the exits were, he gave me the rules.
"Three rules," he said.
I blinked. "What?"
"If you're going to be in this room again—and I think you are—there are three rules." He counted them off without looking away. "One: Don't lie to me. Not by omission, not by polite corporate half-truths. If you don't know, say you don't know. If you made a mistake, say you made a mistake. Two: Don't waste my time. If something can be said in five words, don't use ten. If it can be done in ten minutes, don't take an hour. Three—"
He stopped. He smiled, slow and amused, as if he were remembering our elevator.
"Three," he said softly, "don't fall in love with me."
I laughed before I could help it. That won't be a problem.
"Good," he said, but the word landed between us like a dare.
Later, when the intercom buzzed with Ethan's voice—"Adrian, you need to see this. The gossip account just posted."—I thought nothing could shake me.
Until the photo filled the screen: grainy elevator cam, his body leaning above mine, my face tilted up.
It looked intimate. Too intimate.
The caption was a dagger dipped in honey:
BLACKWELL'S NEW TYPE? INTERN SEASON ARRIVES EARLY 😉 #RulesOfDesire
I didn't realize I'd said the words aloud—Rules of Desire—until Adrian turned, eyes dark, unreadable.
He reached past me and shut the folder with my family's name on it.
"Close the door, Ms. Carter," he said, voice a quiet command that slid under my skin. "And lock it."