Until the Rain Breaks Him

Rain

I stared at the empty seat again.

There were four hundred graduates in black gowns, and behind us, four thousand proud faces holding balloons, cameras, and homemade signs with names written in glitter, in every font you could imagine. The May air was thick and sticky, and past the edge of the stadium the Kentucky hills rolled out green under a sky already heavy with thunderclouds. A mother was crying so hard she was choking on it. A father shouted, "That's my girl!" while dabbing his eyes with a tiny towel. A little boy was struggling under a banner so huge it blocked everyone behind him, stumbling and laughing so loudly you'd think he was watching his favorite superhero in action.

Row twelve, seat nineteen was the seat I'd reserved for my family.

I was twenty-one, top of my class, finished a year early, and the seats were still empty.

I'd told myself they might come. I told myself that when I booked their seats at the last minute, and I told myself all week, even while I spent way more on my dress than I normally would because my mother hated it when people looked shabby. I kept saying that blood was blood, that a mother's heart could soften, that a father would remember his child no matter what which was Pretty stupid, looking back.

"Rain Smith. Bachelor of Business Administration, summa cum laude. Overall best graduating student."

I stood, and my legs carried me forward on instinct while I walked across the stage with my spine straight and my smile in place, the way I'd learned to at ten years old, when a car dropped me at a boarding school in Kentucky and nobody turned around to wave. My eyes swept the crowd row by row, my breath stuck halfway up my chest, searching for one face that might have slipped in late. The seats were still empty.

Nancy from the cafeteria was waving at me like I'd won the lottery, and even Adam from business class was clapping and smiling, like he hadn't stormed off and insulted me the day I told him I wasn't interested in dating him. The dean shook my hand, and the crowd clapped louder, as politely as they could, but nobody shouted my name, and no banners waved in the air like they had for the people before me.

After the ceremony, I sat alone on the stone steps behind the auditorium, so tired from faking smiles that my jaw ached. Families drifted past in loud, laughing clusters, and a girl from my economics seminar hugged her parents so tightly that her cap fell off, and all three of them cracked up like it was the best thing that had ever happened.

I looked away and pulled out my sketchbook, and I drew the empty chairs without thinking, the way other people bite their nails.

A folded slip of paper slid out of the book and landed on my knee. I didn't have to unfold it. I'd read those words a million times, in my mother's neat handwriting, the day she handed it to me with a bank card, the way you hand a stranger a tip.

*Don't contact us. Don't ever come back.*

I'd gotten two full rides that year, NYU, ten minutes from the house where I grew up, and a school here in Kentucky, and I'd held the NYU letter for exactly one evening before my mother said, without even looking up, "Kentucky has a good program. Pick Kentucky." That was when I understood that being given a choice and being allowed to choose were two very different things.

It hadn't always been like this. Once there was a house full of noise, and my sister Lily laughing in the next room. She was the miracle baby, born after eighteen years of failed IVFs and miscarriages, loved so loudly that the whole house tilted toward her like a plant toward a window, and I never really resented it. I figured standing in someone else's sunlight was still warmer than standing in the dark.

Then came the week of my high school graduation, when my parents drove down to Kentucky, and Lily stayed home to throw me a party. It was easily the best day of my life, right up until we got home and Lily was gone.

No note, no signs of a struggle, nothing. Just an empty house covered in decorations and a cake that said *Congratulations, baby sis.*

My mother looked at me across the kitchen that night, after six hours of cops and crying neighbors, and said, very quietly, "We should never have picked you up from that useless ceremony."

I never touched the bank card. I sold my drawings for twenty dollars apiece and worked at three different cafés instead.

---

My phone buzzed and dragged me out of that awful trip down memory lane. Unknown number. I almost let it ring out. Almost.

"Miss Smith?" The voice on the line was smooth and professional. "I'm calling from Cage Global. Mr. Knight Cage reviewed your internship file. He would like to offer you the position of his personal assistant. Starting Monday."

I forgot how to breathe.

Cage Global was the kind of company people in my program whispered about. Knight Cage didn't hire easily, and you needed years in the business world before you could even dream of walking through his doors. I'd sent in my internship application the way you toss a coin into a fountain, and then I'd forgotten about it.

"Why me?" I heard myself ask.

There was a pause on the other end, just a little too long, like the man was choosing his words. Any other person would have said yes right away, with joy. I had no idea where that question had even come from.

"Mr. Cage believes in rewarding talent," the voice said. "Do you accept?"

I looked down at the empty chair in my sketchbook, then at the empty lawn around me. Almost everyone had gone home.

"Yes," I said. "I accept."

I ended the call and sat very still while the first fat drops of rain began to fall, and then, for the first time in a long time, I laughed out loud, because tomorrow, for once, felt like it belonged to me.

I would think about that laugh for the rest of my life. About the pause on the phone, the one I noticed and decided to ignore, and how, if I'd asked just one more question, I might never have walked through his doors. But nobody had ever wanted me before, and I was too hungry to ask why.

By the time I found out what Knight Cage really wanted from me, I had already signed.

Knight

I'd read Rain Smith's file eleven times.

I read it a twelfth now, standing at my office window on the sixtieth floor, the city spread out beneath me like a board I owned. Top of her class. A year early. She'd volunteered at an animal center while juggling part-time jobs and school. She'd had two full rides, NYU and a school in Kentucky, and she'd taken the one that put hundreds of miles between her and her own family. A boarding school before that. And not one emergency contact on any form she'd ever signed.

Not one.

That was what threw me the first time I read it. She had a whole family back here in the city, and she'd listed no one. I didn't like surprises, and that one had sat in my gut for days.

She is a Smith, I reminded myself. *That's all she is, and that's what she'll always be.*

It had taken four months to set up. Her internship application had been one of three thousand, and she'd turned hers in late. The second I heard her name had come through, I went down to HR myself, took her file, and told them to close the applications so no one else could be considered. Nobody asked why. Nobody at Cage Global ever asked me why. That was what I paid them for.

I spent those four months watching her the way a predator studies its prey. Where she ate lunch. Which library carrel she always claimed, the one by the window. The twenty-dollar sketches she sold to students on weekends, which could have easily gone for hundreds. I'd expected greed, or vanity, or at least a little of the rot you find in a girl who knows she's clever.

I found isolation instead. A loneliness so obvious it almost made me feel sorry for her, until I reminded myself she deserved it.

It should have made the plan harder. Instead I told myself it would make it better: the harder she pretended to be meek, the more miserable I'd make her.

A contract sat on my desk, two pages long and perfectly legal. I'd written the clause on the second page myself and made it so dull that nobody would read it twice. It would bind her to me for two years. It would make her mine in every way a courtroom could enforce. She'd sign it because she was young and hungry and grateful, and gratitude is the cheapest chain a man can buy.

"Mr. Cage." My secretary's voice drifted through the door. "Miss Smith is here."

I didn't turn around. "Send her in."

I heard her before I saw her, barely. She was that quiet.

I turned.

She was smaller than I'd expected, in a blazer that clearly wasn't hers, the sleeves too long and the fabric worn thin. She held herself very straight. And her eyes were Lily's eyes, wide and dark and far too innocent for everything they'd hidden.

The sight of them hit me in the chest like a fist.

*Lily, laughing at my brother across a crowded room. Lily, tucking her hair behind her ear while Damon looked at her as if she'd hung the stars. Lily, who smiled at me too, and made me think, for one stupid moment, that my brother had chosen well.*

I turned a page on the desk so she wouldn't see my hand close.

"Sit."

She sat. Her gaze drifted to the window, to the glittering sprawl of the city below, and then came back to me, and she kept steady for all but fifteen seconds before she let her eyes drop.

"You'll be at my side from seven in the morning until I say otherwise," I said. "You'll handle my calendar, my calls, and my flight preparations if the need ever arises. You will not be late. You will not make mistakes. And you will not ask me why."

"I understand, sir."

"Do you?"

Something crossed her face, a flicker of the nerves she'd been fighting since she walked in. I watched her swallow it and square her shoulders.

"I'll work harder than anyone you've ever hired," she said.

*I know you will,* I thought. *That's the point.*

I slid the pen across the desk. She read nothing. She just signed her name, neat as a schoolgirl, the signature of someone who'd never been given anything and hadn't learned to read the fine print.

My hand lifted half an inch off the desk, almost snatching the pen out of her fingers to tell her to read it first instead of signing blind.

I pressed my palm flat against the wood and kept it there.

"Welcome to Cage Global, Miss Smith."

"Thank you, Mr. Cage." She smiled, and I could see the hope in her eyes at the thought of a better life, and it almost looked real. "You won't regret this."

"No," I said softly. "I won't."

She left. The door clicked shut behind her, and I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. I walked back to the window and found her far below, a small figure crossing the lobby, the luckiest girl in the city on the luckiest day of her life.

In my pocket, my fingers closed around a hospital visitor's badge. I'd never been able to throw it away.

Damon, thin and silent behind locked doors. Damon, staring at the wall for hours. Damon, who looked up the last time I visited and asked, in a voice like paper, "Did she come?"

I held my brother's hand and lied. *No. Not yet.* Because the truth would have been worse. Because Lily Smith had taken a boy who loved her with his whole heart and broken him into pieces, and then she'd vanished into the world without so much as a goodbye and never looked back.

She left me with a brother who no longer knew the day of the week, and a house with no one else left in it.

We were orphans. Damon was all I had. And a Smith had taken him.

"Sibling for sibling," I whispered to the glass.

Her sister had destroyed my brother. I'd return the favor, one day at a time, until Rain Smith understood exactly what it meant to lose the only person who'd ever mattered.

Then I went back to my desk, and I began to plan.

Rain

I'd been awake since three, and not because of my alarm, which wasn't set for another hour. My brain had decided the best use of the dark was to rehearse every possible way I could screw up my first day at Cage Global.

By four-thirty I gave up on sleep and ironed my blazer. Three times. I burned my thumb on the second pass and swore under my breath, then held it under the kitchen tap, almost grateful for the excuse. If my hands were going to shake all day, at least now I had a reason.

I locked up my room in Wakefield at a quarter to five, when the whole street was still dark and the only thing awake was a delivery truck idling outside the bodega. The bus took twenty minutes to show up, it dropped me at the train, and from there it was another fifty minutes of the 2 rumbling toward Midtown while the city slowly woke up around me. Somewhere around the third stop I fell asleep standing up with my cheek against a cold pole, and I jerked awake with my heart slamming, sure I'd missed my stop. Nobody looked at me. Honestly, that was the nicest thing that happened to me before six in the morning.

I bought a coffee from a cart outside Cage Global. Three dollars I didn't have, for a drink I didn't even like, but walking into a sixty-story building with empty hands felt like showing up to a party without a gift. I needed something to hold on to.

The lobby was freezing and so quiet I could hear my shoes squeak against the marble. The security guard looked at the badge clipped to my blazer, then at my face, then back at the badge, like he was waiting for the picture to change into somebody more impressive.

"Sixtieth floor," he said. "You're early."

"I like being early." I smiled, hoping it looked more confident than it felt. It didn't. My stomach was doing somersaults, and I was pretty sure he could tell.

"Good luck, kid." One corner of his mouth twitched. "Mr. Cage doesn't do second chances."

"I'm not a kid. I'm his assistant." My voice cracked on the last word, and I wanted to crawl under the desk.

"Even better," he said, waving me toward the elevators. "Longer chew time."

I laughed, which surprised me, and then I stepped into the elevator and watched the numbers climb, and the laugh died somewhere around floor twenty. By forty, my palms were so sweaty the coffee cup was sliding in my grip. By fifty, I was whispering to myself like a crazy person.

You can do this. You've survived worse than a man in a suit.

It didn't help. Not even a little. But when the doors slid open on sixty, I lifted my chin and walked out anyway, because that was the only thing I had ever known how to do.

A woman with silver hair pulled back in a tight knot sat at the desk outside his office, a phone wedged against her shoulder and three folders open in front of her. She looked me over in one quick sweep, the way you'd look at a package you were pretty sure was going to be returned.

"You're Smith." She hung up the phone. "He's in at six-thirty. Don't speak unless he speaks first. Black coffee, no sugar, on his desk before he sits. If he asks for something, it's already late."

"Got it." My voice came out so small I almost apologized for it.

She studied me a second longer than she needed to, and something in her face loosened, just a little. "Kitchen's down the hall. There's tea in the second cupboard. Nobody counts it."

I don't know why that nearly made me cry. Maybe because it was such a tiny, ordinary kindness, and I wasn't used to those. I nodded, swallowed the lump in my throat, and went to make his coffee.

I made it twice. The first cup went cold while I stood outside his door, arguing with myself about whether it was too early to knock, my knuckles an inch from the wood and my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I couldn't stand the thought of him tasting it lukewarm on my very first morning. So I dumped it down the sink and started over.

At six-thirty his private elevator dinged. I jumped up so fast my chair slammed into the wall.

Knight Cage walked past my desk without turning his head.

He was taller than I remembered. Maybe it was just that I'd been sitting during the interview, small in a leather chair that was way too big for me. He didn't look at me, and he didn't look at the coffee, and I stood there with my hands clasped so tightly my nails left little crescents in my palms.

"Miss Smith."

I was in his office before he finished saying my name.

"My nine o'clock is moving to ten. The ten is moving to eleven. Call Holloway and tell him nothing about why." He didn't look up from the folder. "Then pull the Brennan file and have a summary on my desk by noon. Not a copy. A summary."

"Yes, sir."

"Questions?"

I had six. I had twelve. I had a whole list in my head, rehearsed on the bus in the smallest, neatest voice I had.

"No, sir."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth, too quick to name. Then he turned a page. "Go."

I didn't breathe properly until the door shut behind me.

I read the Brennan file standing up in the supply room, because every chair in the open area looked like it belonged to somebody important. Four hundred pages is a long time to stand and hold yourself together. Somewhere around page two hundred my stomach growled so loudly in that silent little room that it could have qualified as a threat. I pressed my hand flat against it and held my breath like it was a person I could shush.

I'd skipped breakfast. I always skipped breakfast. It was easier to stop wanting food than to keep counting what it cost.

I wrote the summary out by hand first, in my neatest writing. Then I typed it. Then I deleted every sentence that wasn't pulling its weight, until it was so clean and careful it didn't even sound like me. I told myself that was the point.

At eleven-fifty I carried it in. He read it without a word while I watched his eyes move down the page and didn't dare look at anything else, not the window, not the skyline, not the single framed photograph on his credenza that had been turned just slightly away from the room.

He reached the bottom and set the page down.

"There's an error in the third paragraph."

My whole body went cold. My ears filled with a thin, high ringing, and underneath it, in the voice I had never managed to leave behind, I heard my mother say useless.

"I'm so sorry, sir, I'll fix it right now, I-"

"The figure is correct," he said. "The date isn't. It was March, not May."

I took the page back with hands that were almost steady and checked it against the file. He was right. March. I'd been so scared of the big things that I'd fumbled a small one.

"I'll correct it now."

"Do." And then, as my hand touched the door, without lifting his eyes: "Noon, Miss Smith."

I stopped. "Sir?"

"You'll take lunch at noon. Every day. Away from your desk." The pen in his hand never paused. "I don't keep staff who faint."

I stood there with the page crumpling in my fist.

Nobody had ever told me to eat. Not my mother, who'd looked straight through me across the dinner table for ten years like I was a window. Not the boarding school, where I'd eaten alone by the glass because the cafeteria noise made my chest hurt. Not one single person in my whole life had said eat like it mattered whether I did.

And he'd said it like an order. A flat, cold order he hadn't even bothered to look up for.

My throat closed so fast I had to stare at the carpet.

"Yes, sir," I managed. "Thank you."

He didn't answer. I hadn't expected him to.

I sat on the stone ledge outside the building with a two-dollar bagel in my lap and the whole city roaring below me, and I couldn't swallow the first bite. My eyes burned. Then I laughed, a wet, ridiculous sound, because here I was, a grown woman with a perfect GPA, crying into bread on a Monday afternoon over six words from a man who hadn't smiled at me once.

I don't keep staff who faint.

Maybe that was just who he was. Maybe he was cold all the way down, and it meant nothing. But I turned that sentence over and over in my head like a coin I'd found on the sidewalk, and it didn't feel like nothing. It felt like somebody had finally noticed there was a me to feed.

I ate every crumb.