Three months in, the calls from overseas had settled into a rhythm Arianne could predict almost to the hour — Franz's voice thin and half-asleep on a call scheduled around a night shoot, a photo of a sunset over a coastline she'd now seen in person twice, a running joke about the hotel's terrible coffee that had outlasted every other joke between them that quarter. She was in a board meeting, halfway through a slide on Q3 projections, when her phone lit up once against the table, a single line from Gio. Need you upstairs. Now. Nothing else attached to it.
She excused herself and told the room to take ten minutes, and didn't explain why. Gio never pulled her out of a meeting for anything that could wait for the end of it.
He was standing outside her office when she got there, and the moment he stepped in ahead of her and pulled the door shut behind them, a break from his usual habit of leaving it open, she understood something had already gone wrong.
