Elena knelt over the dark stain spreading across the lobby's pale marble floor, her movements careful and practiced despite the exhaustion evident in every line of her posture. She'd been working in this household for nearly four months now, kept largely to the back corridors and service areas, her schedule arranged with what she'd assumed was simple household efficiency but had, she was beginning to suspect, actually been deliberate avoidance orchestrated by someone determined to keep her out of sight.
"I was almost finished," she murmured, not looking up, assuming the approaching footsteps belonged to household staff rather than anyone who might actually take notice of her presence.
The footsteps stopped abruptly, close enough now that she finally glanced upward, expecting perhaps a brief admonishment to hurry along. Instead, she found herself looking up into the face of a man she hadn't seen in three years, his expression carrying the particular shock of someone confronting something they'd stopped allowing themselves to hope for.
"Elena," Damian said, his voice barely above a whisper, the single word carrying the weight of three years of searching finally, unexpectedly resolved.