Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Nobody mentions the part where you’re sitting on the edge of your bed at 6:47 a.m., fully dressed for work fifteen minutes early because you’ve been awake since five and there’s only so many times you can rearrange the books on your windowsill before it starts to feel clinical.
I look at the books now. They’re organized by color, which I know is objectively unhinged, but I like the way it looks. A little rainbow of secondhand paperbacks, their spines cracked and faded, most of them romances. Because I’m apparently the kind of person who still reads love stories even after her own turned out to be fiction.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. A text from my mom.
Joni: Good morning sweetheart! Remember to eat breakfast! I read that skipping meals affects your brain chemistry and I don’t want your brain chemistry affected!
This is followed by three sun emojis, a flexing arm, and what I think is supposed to be a bowl of cereal but looks more like a hat.
I type back: Already ate! Love you!
It’s a lie, but it can’t be helped. Joni Morgan worries enough for the both of us and then some, and she’s three hours away in a house whose roof I’m still secretly paying to fix, so the least I can do is not add “my daughter skips breakfast” to her list of concerns.
I grab my bag, check my reflection one last time, hair down, minimal makeup, the outfit of a woman who takes this job seriously but also got dressed in four minutes, and head out.
The morning is cold, the kind that bites at your ears and makes your eyes water, and I walk quickly through the three blocks between my apartment and the shuttle stop. Lykaios Holdings runs a fleet of sleek black shuttles that pick up employees from designated points around the city, which I thought was incredibly generous when I first started and now realize is probably just because the headquarters is located halfway up a mountain and nobody wants to deal with the parking.
The shuttle’s already waiting. I climb on, find my usual seat near the back, and pull out my phone to scroll through absolutely nothing of importance while the bus fills up around me.
This is my life now.
Wake up too early. Lie to my mom about breakfast. Ride a shuttle up a mountain to a job I genuinely love but still can’t believe I have. Come home. Read. Sleep. Repeat.
It’s small. It’s quiet.
And after everything that’s happened with Billy, small and quiet is exactly what I need.
LYKAIOS HOLDINGS IS the sort of place that makes you feel like you’ve accidentally walked into the wrong building.
Every single day.
I’ve been working here for three months, and I still get that little jolt of wait, me? really? every time the shuttle crests the last hill and the building comes into view. It’s all glass and dark stone, built into the mountainside like it grew there, and on clear mornings like this one, the windows catch the sunrise and turn the whole structure gold.
Inside, it’s even more intimidating. The lobby alone is bigger than my entire apartment complex, with these impossibly high ceilings and floors made of some stone that seems to have light embedded in it. Not reflecting light. Containing it. Like someone figured out how to trap starlight in marble, which, given that the company’s founder is a preter, is probably exactly what happened.
The founder.
Prince Alexei Lykaios.
I’ve seen him exactly four times in three months. Which, according to Trish, who has worked here for two years and keeps a running tally on a sticky note inside her desk drawer, makes me statistically blessed.
“Most people go their whole employment without a single sighting,” she told me on my second week, her voice dropping to a whisper even though we were alone in the break room. “He’s like a cryptid. A really, really beautiful cryptid.”
She wasn’t wrong.
The first time I saw him, I was coming out of the elevator on the twelfth floor, balancing a stack of sample boards that were taller than my head. I didn’t even know he was there until the air in the hallway changed. That’s the only way I can describe it. One second it was normal office air, slightly too cold from the AC, smelling vaguely of someone’s afternoon coffee. And then it was something else.
I lowered the sample boards just enough to peek over them, and there he was at the far end of the corridor, walking with two people I didn’t recognize. He was taller than I expected from the company website photos, and lean enough that his dark suit looked like it had been designed specifically for his body, which it probably had. His hair was blue-black under the corridor lights, and he moved with a grace that made everyone around him look like they were operating at the wrong speed.