Dominic's POV
Darkness is an honest thing.
It takes the lies out of a room. It leaves a pulse, a breath, a body three feet away, shaking like a struck wire.
"It's all right," I say. "It's just the grid."
"I know."
"Midtown does it every few years."
"I know."
Her voice is thin and high, not her own. I put out a hand and find her sleeve.
She flinches.
Then she grabs me.
Both hands, hard, her nails through my shirt. I can feel the whole length of her trembling against my arm.
"Vera."
"It's the dark. I'm fine. It's just... it's just the dark."
It isn't the dark.
I've known the difference for three years. Before the boat she was afraid of nothing. Spiders. Thunder. A knife-fight in a Brooklyn bar, once, with a man twice her size who tried to take her handbag. Since then, a match. A candle. The smell of a barbecue on a summer evening.
I put my arm around her shoulders without thinking.
"Come here."
"I can't..."
"Breathe with me. In. Hold. Out."
She does. I feel her do it, in the dark, against my ribs. Her hair smells of rain and rosemary soap.
The emergency lights pop on a second later, a low red glow along the ceiling. Somewhere down the corridor, a generator coughs and catches.
"Marcus," I say into my phone.
"Boss. Full outage on Park from fifty-sixth to sixty-fourth. Con Ed says forty minutes." A pause. "The generators have kicked in. The elevators will run to the nearest floor, if you want to go down."
"We do."
"Stairwell's locked. Fire doors seal in a blackout. You'll have to take the car."
"Fine."
"Boss." He says it slowly. "Did anyone know you'd be in the building tonight?"
I look at the woman beside me.
"A few people."
"I'll meet you at fifty-nine."
***
The elevator is a steel box with a mirror and a brass handrail.
She doesn't want to go in. I watch her stand at the open doors, her hand pressed flat to her scarf, staring at the little cage as if it were a lit window in a house where someone had died.
"It's fifty-nine," I say gently. "Two floors. Thirty seconds."
"I know."
"I'll be beside you."
"I know that, too."
She steps in.
The doors slide shut with a soft, final whisper. The red emergency light glows above us.
I press fifty-nine.
We drop.
It's very smooth. Very slow. Sixty-one, sixty-one, sixty, and there's a sound like the cough of a big dog, and the whole car shudders, and stops.
The light goes out.
"No," says Vera, very quietly.
It comes back, flickering, dim.
"It's all right," I say. "It's the generator. It'll re-engage."
"We've stopped."
"Yes."
"We're stuck."
"Briefly."
"I..."
She makes a small, strangled noise and turns away from me, forehead pressed to the steel wall, one hand over her mouth.
I feel every muscle in my body go still.
I know that sound.
I heard it in a stairwell, a week ago, through the crack of a door.
I'm about to speak when I smell it.
It's faint. A thin, acrid thread at the back of the nose, like burnt toast, like hot wire.
Smoke.
"Dominic," she whispers.
"I know."
"Dominic, is that..."
"It's the cable. It's a short circuit in the shaft. It happens. Don't..."
"Don't tell me it's nothing!"
It's a scream.
She turns on me, wild-eyed, white to the lips, and I see it.
Not Vera Lowell, who counted her steps and mourned a coffee, who knew how to lie to a chairman about a bakery.
Serena.
My Serena, on her knees in a burning hold, with salt on her mouth.
She's gone. She's not in this elevator. She's somewhere else, a long way away, and she's remembering something so terrible that her face has lost every drop of colour.
"I can't," she says. "I can't, I can't. Not again, I can't. It's the fire. Dom, it's the fire."
I catch her.
I don't decide to.
My arms are around her and her whole body goes into mine, shaking, gasping, her nails in my back, her face in my shirt. She's sobbing with great, dry, breathless gasps, and I can feel her heart through three layers of cloth.
"I've got you," I say. "I've got you."
"Don't let go."
"I won't."
"Please."
"I won't. I've got you, I've got you, it's all right. It's not a fire. It's a cable. Listen to me. Listen. It's thin, it's nothing, we're two floors from safety, I swear on my life."
"Dom," she says.
I stop.
It isn't a word. It's a sound.
It's a short, soft, wrecked syllable, the way she said it at the end of a long day, in the dark, with her head on my chest and the whole world quiet. The way she said it on a boat. The way she said it at the altar.
She doesn't hear herself.
She's too far gone.
"Dom," she says again, and her voice is not husky, not foreign, not rebuilt by a surgeon on an island; it's low and clear and a little cracked, the voice I fell in love with when I was thirty and she was painting a sea wall in the rain. "Dom, please. Please don't let me burn."
The ground falls out of me.
My eyes burn.
I put my hand on the back of her head and press her face harder into my shoulder, and I say, in a voice I barely recognise: "Never. Not ever. Do you hear me? Not as long as I'm alive."
She doesn't answer.
She goes limp against me, spent, shaking, breathing in short sobs.
I hold her.
The smoke thickens.
It's not a cable. I can tell now. It's too dry, too chemical, with a sweetness at the back, like fireworks.
It's coming from the air vent above the mirror.
I look up.
Somebody has packed a smoke canister into the ventilation duct. It's tucked in behind the grille, a little black cylinder the size of a soda can, trailing a thin grey line.
Not a fire.
A test.
I go cold from the neck down.
The outage. The locked stairwell. The generator that stalled, exactly here, exactly now, with the two of us alone in a box and a camera in every corner of the ceiling.
Somebody wanted to see what she'd do.
Somebody wants to know whether the woman I hired is afraid of fire.
I lift my head.
There it is. The black glass dome in the corner. A camera lens, quiet as an eye, its tiny red light blinking.
Whoever is watching has just seen my chief of staff fall apart in my arms and say a name she'd never use.
I keep my arm around her.
I keep my face perfectly blank.
And through the speaker above the door, tinny and distorted, comes a voice I've known since I was born.
"Dominic? It's Augustus. Are you in there? I'm in the building, dear boy. I heard what happened. I'm so terribly sorry."
Vera lifts her head from my chest.
Her eyes are red and wild and slowly, slowly coming into focus.
"Who's that?" she whispers.
I look at the lens.
And I smile at my godfather, for the camera, for the man behind the glass, for the one person in New York who must never know what I've just heard.
"It's nobody," I say gently. "Just a friend."