The most dangerous things
never announce themselves.
They just — arrive.
And by the time you notice
it is already too late.
Ava's best friend had three reactions to everything.
Loud. Louder. And the specific register that only dogs and people who loved her could hear.
"He fixed your HEEL?" Zara dropped her fork onto her plate with a sound that made the entire café look up. "Kade Voss. THE Kade Voss. Billionaire. Never smiles in photographs. Rumored to have made a grown man cry in a board meeting — THAT Kade Voss told you to charge your shoe repair to his personal account on the day he met you?"
"Keep your voice down," Ava said.
"I will absolutely not keep my voice down." Zara leaned across the table. She was beautiful the way fire was beautiful — warm and bright and occasionally dangerous, with dark skin and natural hair she wore like a crown and eyes that missed nothing and judged everything with the specific joyful ruthlessness of someone who found people endlessly entertaining. "Ava. That man does not notice things. He has assistants to notice things for him. And he noticed your heel."
"He noticed it was making noise," Ava said. "It was annoying him."
"He noticed YOUR heel," Zara said again, as if repetition would make Ava understand what she was clearly refusing to understand. "Do you know how many people walk through that building every single day making noise? He didn't offer to fix any of their shoes."
"Zara—"
"I'm just saying what I'm saying." She picked her fork back up. Pointed it. "Be careful."
Ava looked at her. "It's a job."
"Everything starts as just something," Zara said. "And then it becomes the thing that changes everything." She took a bite of her pasta with the satisfaction of someone who had delivered a truth and knew it. "I've seen his picture, by the way. He is obscenely good looking."
"I didn't notice," Ava said.
Zara stared at her.
"I noticed," Ava admitted. "I just didn't think about it."
"That," Zara said, "is the most Ava Maren sentence you have ever said." She raised her glass. "To your first day Monday. May it be absolutely chaotic and may you tell me every single detail."
Ava raised her glass.
She did not tell Zara that she had thought about the grey eyes exactly once since leaving the building.
She was very good at not mentioning things.
Monday arrived the way Mondays always did — with complete indifference to whether anyone was ready for it.
Ava was ready.
She was at the building at 8:47. Thirteen minutes early. New heels — not expensive, but silent. Hair pulled back. The specific expression she wore when she had decided to be completely unreadable and meant it.
Clara met her at the elevator.
"He's already been here three hours," Clara said, by way of greeting.
"What time does he arrive?"
"It varies. Sometimes six. Sometimes he doesn't leave from the night before." She handed Ava a phone — sleek, already set up, already buzzing with a morning's worth of notifications. "This is yours now. His calls route through it between eight and ten when I'm transitioning out. His personal number is saved under V." She paused. "He has called it once in three years."
"When?"
"The night the Singapore deal collapsed." Clara looked at her steadily. "He didn't say anything when I answered. He just needed someone to pick up." She paused. "I don't know why I'm telling you that."
Ava filed it carefully. "Thank you."
"Come. I'll show you the systems."
The morning passed in a blur of information.
Scheduling systems, communication protocols, the specific hierarchy of which calls got put through immediately and which got held and which got redirected without explanation. The coffee order — black, no sugar, temperature specific enough that Clara had the café downstairs trained to a precise standard. The board meeting preparation process. The filing system that looked chaotic and was actually perfectly organized in a logic that took Ava forty minutes to crack and then seemed completely obvious.
She cracked it in twenty-five.
Clara watched her do it without commenting. But she watched.
Kade Voss moved through the morning like weather — present everywhere without being visible, his effect felt in the way people straightened slightly when his office door opened, in the way conversations paused and resumed at a different register when he passed through the open plan. He walked through twice. Both times his eyes moved to Ava's desk with the brief assessing quality of someone checking a variable.
Both times he kept walking.
At eleven-thirty his door opened and stayed open.
"Miss Maren."
She was at his door in thirty seconds — not running, the swift purposeful movement of someone who understood that his time had a different weight than most people's.
He was standing at the window. The city below him. His hands in his pockets and his jacket gone and his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow in a way that was completely functional and somehow deeply distracting.
Ava looked at the notepad in her hand.
"The Henderson file," he said. "I need the contract amendment history from the last eighteen months, cross referenced with the communication log from their legal team, and a summary of where the liability exposure sits currently." He turned from the window. "How long."
"Forty minutes," she said.
Something moved in his eyes. "Clara would have said two hours."
"Clara doesn't cross reference while she pulls," Ava said. "I do."
A pause. The specific pause of someone recalibrating.
"Thirty-five minutes," he said. "Close the door."
She closed the door.
She had it on his desk in thirty-two.
She knew it was good work — thorough, clearly structured, the liability exposure laid out in language that didn't require a legal degree to follow. She set it on his desk without comment and turned to leave.
"Sit."
She sat.
He read. She watched him read — the specific quality of his focus, the way his eyes moved down the page without pausing, without backtracking, absorbing information at a speed that wasn't normal. Three minutes for twelve pages of dense material.
He set it down.
"You restructured the summary," he said.
"The original format buried the most important exposure point on page nine," she said. "I moved it to the top."
"I would have found it."
"I know," she said. "But now you found it faster."
He looked at her across the desk with those grey eyes and the specific quality of his attention settled on her like a hand pressing down — not uncomfortable exactly, but present in a way that was impossible to ignore.
"You've done legal work before," he said.
"Paralegal. Eight months. Before that financial analysis. Before that—"
"Fourteen jobs," he said.
"Fourteen opportunities to learn different systems," she said. "Depending on how you look at it."
The corner of his mouth moved.
Not a smile. The ghost of one — there and gone so fast she almost doubted she'd seen it.
"That will be all," he said.
She stood. Moved to the door.
"Miss Maren."
She turned. He was already looking back at the file.
"The coffee," he said. "You changed the order."
She had. She'd tasted the café's current batch that morning and it was running slightly over-extracted — she'd adjusted the brew time and temperature by marginal amounts that most people wouldn't notice.
"The batch was off," she said. "I corrected it."
Silence.
"Close the door," he said.
She did.
In the corridor she let out one slow breath.
Then she went back to her desk and did not think about the almost-smile.
She was getting less good at not thinking about things.
At six-fifteen everyone else had gone home.
Ava was still at her desk finishing the transition documentation Clara had left half complete. She was aware that she was alone on the floor. She was aware that the light under Kade's office door was still on. She was aware — in the specific peripheral way of someone who was absolutely not paying attention to something — of the exact moment his door opened.
He stopped when he saw her.
"You're still here," he said.
"Clara left the transition documents unfinished," she said without looking up. "If I don't complete them tonight the Thursday board prep will run short."
Silence.
She felt him looking at her with that weight that his attention always carried.
"The building locks the upper floors at seven," he said.
"I'll be done by six fifty," she said.
Another silence. Longer.
"There's food in the executive kitchen," he said. "If you haven't eaten."
She looked up.
He was already walking toward the elevator. Jacket back on. The specific posture of someone who had said something they weren't going to elaborate on and was not going to be caught looking back to see how it landed.
The elevator doors opened.
He stepped in.
The doors closed.
Ava sat at her desk in the empty ninth floor and looked at the space where he had been standing and felt something she had no name for settle somewhere in the region of her chest.
She finished the documentation in eighteen minutes.
She went to the executive kitchen.
There was food there — good food, the kind that came from the restaurant on the building's second floor. Still warm. One serving.
He had called down before he left.
She sat alone in the executive kitchen of Voss Enterprises and ate the food that Kade Voss had ordered for her without being asked and told herself this meant absolutely nothing.
She was becoming significantly less convincing.
Three floors below in the building's private parking garage Kade Voss sat in his car without starting it.
He had his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the concrete wall in front of him and he was thinking about nothing specific.
The curse had not stirred.
In fifteen years every woman who had gotten within his radius for longer than a professional interaction had felt it — the cold specific pressure of something old and deliberate pressing against the edges of their luck. Small things at first. Then larger ones. He had learned to keep his distance before the small things became large ones. He had become very good at distance.
Ava Maren had been in his space for nine hours.
Nothing.
Not a flicker. Not a pressure. Not the faintest suggestion of the cold thing waking up and taking notice.
He sat with that for a long time.
Then he started the car.
He drove home through the city dark and did not examine what it meant that for the first time in fifteen years he had sat in an office with someone and simply — worked.
Like a person.
Like someone who was allowed to.
The city lights moved across his windshield and somewhere in the old buried place where the vow lived he felt something he had no name for shift very slightly.
Like something turning over in its sleep.
Like something beginning to wake up.
— End of Chapter Two —
He ordered her food without being asked. She noticed. He noticed that she noticed. The curse didn't stir — and that terrifies him more than if it had. 🖤🔥
Next Chapter: "Zara" — Ava's best friend shows up at Voss Enterprises unannounced. Kade meets Zara. Zara meets Kade. And Zara sees in thirty seconds what Ava has been refusing to see since Monday.
Drop a comment — are you already OBSESSED?! 🔥 Add to library — Chapter 3 coming in 2 days! 🌙🖤
© Cursed By His Own Vow | The Voss Legacy — Book One
Written by Daoistaglcx 🖤