His office was not what she expected.
She had expected glass and ego, the kind of office designed to communicate wealth and power before you'd even sat down, where the furniture was chosen to intimidate and the desk was approximately the size of a small country. What she got instead was a room that looked like it was actually used. Books that had been read. A whiteboard along one wall covered in diagrams she'd have needed ten minutes to decode. A desk with the specific productive disorder of someone who thought faster than they filed.
She sat across from him and placed her printed CV on the desk between them she had brought a physical copy, which she had noticed immediately was something none of the other candidates had apparently bothered to do, based on the slight shift in his expression when he saw it.
He did not look at it.
He looked at her.
"No hotel industry experience," he said.
"No," she agreed.
"Never managed a team beyond university projects."
"Correct."
"Your father's company and mine competed for the same properties for eleven years."
"I know."
"That doesn't bother you."
It wasn't a question, but she answered it like one. "It bothered me enough that I sat outside your building for ten minutes this morning having a conversation with myself about whether to come in." She met his eyes evenly. "I came in."
He leaned back slightly. He had the stillness of someone who was doing a great deal of thinking while appearing to do very little of anything. "Tell me why I should hire you."
"Because I'm going to rebuild the Sovereign," she said. "And to do that, I need to understand how the best operation in this industry actually works from the inside, not from a business school case study. You built something extraordinary. I need to learn from it." She paused. "And I will outwork every other candidate you interviewed, because I have something none of them have."
"Which is?"
"A reason that isn't just a salary."
The room was quiet. Outside the window, Manhattan performed its usual indifference to anything happening indoors.
Damien Price looked at her for a long moment. The kind of look that felt like being read, not unpleasantly but thoroughly. Like he was taking inventory of something.
"What do you know about our current development pipeline?" he asked.
And the interview stopped being a formality.
-----
It lasted fifty minutes.
He asked her things she knew and things she didn't, and a handful of things that she suspected weren't really questions at all, just measurements, tests of how she navigated territory she hadn't mapped. She answered honestly when she could and precisely when she couldn't, and she did not apologize for her gaps and she did not perform a confidence she hadn't earned.
When it was done, he walked around the desk and extended his hand.
"Monday," he said. "Eight AM. Don't be late."
She shook it. His grip was firm and brief and he released it cleanly. "Thank you," she said.
"Don't thank me yet." His eyes held hers for just a beat longer than was strictly necessary. "The job is harder than the interview."
She nodded and turned toward the door. She was almost through it when his voice came again, quieter, and something in the tone of it made the back of her neck prickle.
"Miss Holloway."
She turned.
He was already looking back at his desk, picking up his phone like the conversation had concluded a sentence ago. "Welcome to the Price Group."
"Thank you," she said just before she walked out.
She made it to the elevator, into the lobby, through the revolving door and out onto the Midtown sidewalk before she let out the breath she'd been compressing since the moment he'd said I wanted to see if you'd actually come in.
She called Mia.
"I got it," she said, the second the call connected.
The scream was loud enough that a businessman walking past actually turned to look at her. She didn't care. She was smiling, the first real smile in three weeks, standing on a midtown sidewalk with her heart hammering and the city enormous around her and her mother's watch loose on her wrist.
She had walked into the enemy's building.
She had shaken his hand.
She had noticed, against every instruction she had given herself this morning, that his eyes were the kind of dark that stayed with you. The kind you'd find yourself thinking about later, in a quiet moment when you weren't prepared.
She was not going to think about that.
She had a hotel to save.