MY BOSS IS A VAMPIRE

Elena Torres had rehearsed the same three answers in her head for so long on the train that they had stopped sounding like words and started sounding like a song stuck on repeat. Tell me about yourself. Why do you want this position. What is your greatest weakness. She had answers for all of them, polished smooth from four months of interviews that had gone nowhere, but standing outside the glass doors of Ashworth Holdings, she felt every one of those answers evaporate out of her skull like steam off a kettle.

The building itself did not help. It rose out of the financial district like something that had been carved rather than built, black stone and dark glass, no name on the outside except a small brass plaque by the entrance that simply read ASHWORTH. She had researched the company the night before until her eyes burned, and the story that kept surfacing again and again was that nobody really knew what Damien Ashworth did with his money, only that he had a great deal of it and that he almost never gave interviews. There were maybe six photographs of him online, all from a distance, all slightly blurred, as if the man had an allergy to cameras. She checked her reflection in the glass door.

Her hair had started to escape its clip on the walk over, and she tucked the loose pieces back with fingers that were shaking just slightly. She told herself it was the coffee. It was not the coffee. The lobby smelled like money, which was to say it smelled like nothing at all, cold marble and recycled air and the faint chemical sweetness of flowers that were too perfect to be real.

A receptionist with a headset and an expression of practiced neutrality directed her to the fourteenth floor, and Elena spent the elevator ride trying to remember how to breathe normally. The assistant who met her on fourteen introduced herself as Priya and walked fast, the kind of fast that told Elena this was a woman who had learned to move at the pace her employer expected rather than the pace that suited her.

Priya's eyes flicked over Elena once, quick and assessing, and something in that look made Elena's stomach drop even further. It was not unkind. It was closer to pity. You'll want to keep your answers short, Priya said, stopping in front of a set of doors that looked like they belonged on a bank vault rather than an office. He doesn't like when people ramble. Before Elena could ask anything else, the door was open and she was being ushered inside, and then the door closed behind her and she was alone in a room with Damien Ashworth.

He did not look up right away. He was seated behind a desk that seemed too large for any ordinary use, reading something on a tablet with the kind of stillness that made Elena think of photographs rather than people, and for one long moment the only sound in the room was the faint tick of a clock somewhere she could not locate. She had time to notice the office was cold, colder than the lobby, and that there were no personal photographs anywhere, no plants, nothing that suggested a life existed outside of the numbers on his screen.

Then he looked up, and Elena forgot every rehearsed answer she had ever practiced. It was not that he was handsome, though he was, in the sharp and unsettling way of men who look carved rather than born. It was something underneath that, something in the way his gaze moved over her that felt less like being seen and more like being read. His eyes were dark, dark enough that she could not immediately place their color, and for one strange second she thought she saw something flicker behind them, something that had nothing to do with polite professional interest.

Miss Torres, he said, and his voice was low and even and completely without warmth. Please sit. She sat. She opened her mouth to deliver the first of her rehearsed lines, and that was when it happened. Damien went rigid. It was so slight that if Elena had blinked she would have missed it entirely, a fractional stillness that swept through his shoulders and jaw, as though someone had pressed pause on him for half a second.

His nostrils flared once, barely perceptible, and his hand, resting flat on the desk, curled slowly into a fist and then released. His eyes had gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere past her, somewhere inward, and for one terrifying instant Elena thought she had done something wrong just by existing in the chair across from him. Mr Ashworth, she said carefully. Should I come back another time? The question seemed to physically cost him something to answer. No, he said. Stay. My apologies. I was distracted by another matter. There was no other matter.

Elena would learn this later, but in that moment she only knew that something about the air in the room had changed, that it had gone taut in a way she had no language for. Damien's jaw worked once, subtly, like a man swallowing something bitter, and when he spoke again his voice was tighter than before, controlled in the particular way of someone exerting a great deal of effort to sound normal.

Tell me why you want this position, he said. She gave her rehearsed answer. She was fairly sure it came out coherent, though she could not have repeated a word of it five minutes later, because the entire time she spoke she was aware of him watching her with an intensity that had nothing to do with her qualifications.

His eyes kept dropping, almost against his will, to the side of her neck, to the pulse point just visible above her collar, and then snapping back up as though he had caught himself doing something forbidden. The interview lasted eleven minutes. Elena knew this because she checked her phone the second she was back in the elevator, hands still trembling, uncertain whether she had just secured the best job of her career or walked into something she did not have the vocabulary to name.

Upstairs, alone again, Damien sat very still at his desk long after the door had closed. The scent of her lingered in the room, warm and impossibly sweet, threading through the recycled air like something alive. He had not hungered like this in decades. He had built an entire existence on the discipline of not hungering like this, and one woman in a gray blazer had undone it in eleven minutes without saying a single word that mattered. He pressed the intercom.

Priya, he said. Hire her. There was a pause on the other end, the kind of pause that meant his assistant was weighing whether to ask the obvious question. Are you certain, sir, she said finally. Damien looked at his own hand, at the faint tremor he had not felt in longer than he could remember, and said nothing for a moment. Yes, he said. Start her Monday.

The fourteenth floor on a Monday morning was nothing like the hushed, empty space Elena had walked through for her interview. Phones rang in overlapping bursts, someone was arguing quietly but urgently in French near the elevator bank, and a man in a very expensive suit power walked past her carrying three tablets stacked on top of each other like he was afraid to put any of them down.

Elena stood near the reception desk clutching her badge, feeling like a tourist who had wandered onto a film set mid scene. Priya found her within thirty seconds, which told Elena that someone had been watching for her arrival. You made it, Priya said, already moving. Good. First rule of this floor, you learn where the fire stairs are before you learn where the coffee machine is, because one of those will save your life and it is not the coffee machine.

Elena laughed before she realized Priya was not entirely joking. The tour that followed was brisk and thorough. Priya pointed out the le