Skywell

The service elevator was never supposed to stop between floors.

Willa Graves is the visiting structural engineer signed to sign off on a glass skywell at the crown of Aperture Tower. She is sturdy, practical, and finished with pretending she does not watch the principal when he thinks she is reading deflection numbers. Nikolai Rourke owns the stack. Forty-one, silver at the temples, green eyes that do not look away first. He lives in the unfinished penthouse the way other men live in hotels, and he has been watching the way she stands when the floor is empty.

When the freight car hangs on a hyphen between forty and the sky, there is a four-minute camera delay, a manual brake, and six hours until the contractor. He offers her the brake. She does not take it.

What happens in the cage is filthy and chosen. What happens in the glass throat above the city is worse, and better: unlocked stairs, a cleaners cart two floors down, breeding talk that stops being talk, a resident offer that is not about the report.

Willa came to close a job. The skywell is sound. She is not leaving.