The Billionaire’s Witch on the Thirteenth Floor

The coffee stain had been arranged to look accidental. Nia could tell because it stopped short of the grout, where a real spill would have made Jo Baptiste’s morning worse.

“Someone did this with a spoon,” she said.

Jo glanced at the little brown continent on the lobby marble. “Someone has three applicants and one vacancy. What would you use?”

“Warm water first. Neutral cleaner if that fails. Whoever polished this floor will murder me if I use vinegar.”

“That was me. I’d settle for a written warning.”

Nia knelt, folded her cloth into quarters, and began at the edge. Beyond the revolving doors, Monday traffic dragged rain along Bellwether’s lake road. Inside Cross Tower, white orchids stood in pots large enough to conceal a person. The coffee station smelled of roasted beans and the lemon oil someone had used on the cabinetry. She preferred the coffee. Lemon oil on lacquer was a future fingerprint problem.

Jo checked something on her clipboard. At forty-six, the supervisor had the upright posture of a woman who had spent years refusing to carry other people’s slack in her lower back.

“Trial runs seven to nine. Twenty-four dollars an hour, whether you get the job or not. Break at eight. You don’t skip it to impress me.”

Forty-eight dollars would replace the bus money Nia had spent interviewing that week and leave enough for groceries. She was thirty-one, experienced, and tired of being described as promising by people who would not hire her.

“Do staff sign that privacy clause?” she asked, indicating the framed residential welcome notice beside the desk. ONE HOME. ONE SECRET. COMPLETE DISCRETION.

“Tenants only. We sign confidentiality about what we see at work. You find a diamond earring, it comes to me. You find an affair, you finish the bathroom.”

“What if it’s an affair with the diamond earring?”

Jo’s mouth shifted. “Then you do the bathroom twice.”

Nia lifted the cloth. The stain was gone. She set the small caution sign where a person approaching from the doors would see it, rather than tucked behind the orchid as it had been when she arrived.

That earned another mark.

For forty minutes there was work she understood: elevator fingerprints, rain grit, a waste bin lined badly enough that coffee had collected underneath the bag. Jo showed her the separate cloth colors and the locked cupboard for supplies. Nia kept her cracked phone in her trouser pocket and her explanations short. She could clean a tower. She did not have to mend one.

At seven fifty a tenant in a camel coat stopped at the coffee station. His damp scarf smelled faintly of wool and expensive smoke. He nodded to Jo, selected an espresso, and stood watching the brass strip beneath the dispenser.

Nia heard the click before the grinder started.

Twelve seconds later it clicked again.

She looked up from fitting a fresh bin liner. The machine was ordinary stainless steel except for the strip, which had a seam too fine for a household fitting. Beneath it hung a blue service tag with the Bellwether municipal water emblem. Someone had threaded the tag through a hole instead of sticking it to the case.

The tenant bent close to retrieve his cup.

“I told her the letter hadn’t come.”

He jerked upright. Coffee splashed across his knuckles. His mouth had not moved.

Jo put down her clipboard. “Sir?”

“I told her the letter hadn’t come,” the machine said again, in his voice, with the same small weary pause after told.

The tenant’s face went blotchy. “Turn that off.”

Jo picked up a spare paper cup to catch the overflow and reached past him for the stop switch. A hard jet of water struck her wrist. She cried out and dropped the cup.

Nia was already moving.

“Away from the counter. Both of you.”

Jo hit the switch with her good hand. The display went black. Steam kept rising from the nozzle. Under the cabinet, a drain hose knocked against the wood at twelve-second intervals.

An electrical appliance should have stopped when its power stopped. Nia knew that with the certainty of a woman who had once explained the same fact too late.

“Unplug it,” the tenant demanded.

“Jo, can you stand at the doors and keep people back? Use cold running water on your wrist. Don’t put cream on it.”

“Nia—”

“Please.”

Jo saw whatever was in her face and stepped away. The tenant remained, staring at the dead screen as if he could compel it to forget him.

The brass seam brightened.

Nia pulled the metal mop bucket from her trolley. It held clean rinse water; she had not added detergent. She shoved it beneath the station’s counter, wedged its base against the exposed grounded drain pipe, and tested the contact with the steel shaft of her mop. A faint tremor ran through the handle. Bad. Manageable, perhaps, but bad.

She could stop now. Call a licensed breaker. Watch hot water build pressure in a narrow housing beside a lobby full of people.

In the shop where she used to work, her injured client had asked why she had thought perhaps was enough.

“Everyone behind the sign,” she said. “Nobody touches the cabinet.”

The man in the camel coat finally obeyed.

She looped the spare steel scourer from Jo’s supply tray around the end of the mop shaft, pressed that end into the water, and brought the loose mesh against the brass seam. The first pulse slid into the pipe with a sound like grit dragged over glass. The second bucked the mesh sideways.

She should have used a clamp. There was no clamp on a cleaning trolley.

Nia held the scourer flat with her left index and middle fingers. Heat bit through the wet strands. She counted aloud, keeping pressure while the interval completed.

“Nine. Ten. Eleven.”

At twelve the machine said, “I told—” and fell quiet.

The water stopped. Her fingers did not stop hurting.

For a moment all she could do was keep the handle still. Steam thinned. The seam lost its sheen. She lifted her hand and saw two raw red lines across the finger pads.

“Nobody move that bucket,” she said.

“Nobody will.”

The answer came from a man at the far side of the caution sign. Dark suit, no tie, rain on one shoulder. She recognized Adrian Cross from the advertisement mounted outside the leasing office. The photograph had removed the tired skin beneath his eyes and made his hair less unruly.

The real version was more arresting, which annoyed her. She had just burned herself in his lobby; she could afford no interest in his cheekbones.

“The power’s disconnected?” he asked.

“The switch is off. Don’t assume that makes it safe.”

He looked at the mop, pipe, bucket, and scourer in that order. “What remains unsafe?”

“The brass circuit. I grounded the fault. I haven’t repaired it.”

“Can it be left like this?”

“Behind a barrier, until someone qualified isolates it properly.”

His gaze moved to her fingers. He made no attempt to take her hand.

“Jo, there’s a first-aid sink in the staff kitchen.”

“I know where my sink is.” Jo’s voice had recovered its working edge. Her wrist was under a bottle of cool water held by the desk attendant. “Nia, go. Mr. Cross can stare at the machine for twenty minutes.”

“I’ll get a maintenance technician to preserve the ground,” he said.

Jo pointed at the tenant, who had backed toward the public lifts. “And someone gets his name privately. This goes in an incident report. No lobby audience.”

Nia followed her through a door disguised as a wooden wall panel. The staff kitchen had a humming refrigerator, three mismatched chairs, and a rack of mugs with names written on tape. Ordinary chipped mugs steadied her more effectively than the lobby orchids.

At the sink Jo held her wrist beside Nia’s fingers under cool water. They stood shoulder to shoulder while the clock above the refrigerator moved with insulting leisure.

“You didn’t put that skill on your application.”

“I applied to clean.”

“I noticed.”

Nia looked at the water disappearing into the drain. “I trained in curse repair. My licensing isn’t complete. I made a bad judgment on a job without insurance. Someone got hurt.”

“Did you leave them with the bill?”

“I’m paying it. Slowly.”

Jo nodded once. “I need to know when a task isn’t safe. I don’t need you to audition as a fire blanket.”

That reached the part of Nia still expecting dismissal. “I should have had a clamp.”

“Then put it in the report.”

They stayed for the full cooling time. The desk attendant brought dressings and Jo used the first-aid card, declining to improvise because Nia knew machines. Cross returned in the doorway with a maintenance worker carrying a ground clamp and a ceramic isolation case.

“The technician wants your sequence,” he said. “After you’ve been assessed.”

“My sequence isn’t a repair method.”

“I understand.”

She wasn’t certain he did. But he had waited outside the kitchen rather than making the injured women arrange themselves around him. She gave him that much.

Jo received paid cover for the rest of the morning and transport to the clinic. Before leaving, she tagged the coffee machine herself: DO NOT DISPOSE. Nia dictated the interval, the water, the improvised ground, and her own lack of proper equipment. The report recorded the tenant’s statement as an audible replay, without guessing which letter he had hidden.

At nine fifteen Jo called from the clinic. The scald would be dressed; Nia’s burns also needed checking. The trial pay had been approved, including the extra quarter hour. A proper job offer would follow, with modified work today if the nurse permitted it.

“You still want it?” Jo asked.

Nia considered rent, the refrigerator at home, and the machine that had spoken a man’s shame into a lobby.

“Yes. I want safety equipment, too.”

“Good answer. Tomorrow, seven. Today you’ll shadow, after the clinic.”

Nia went to the service corridor to collect her coat. The maintenance worker had parked the lift at ground level with its doors open, then locked its controls while he moved supplies. Beyond the threshold a small wet shoe print marked the rubber floor.

There were no other tracks leading to it.

Nia crouched without touching anything. Flowers and a missing heel tread showed in the narrow sole. A child’s shoe, she thought; the rounded toe was smaller than her palm.

She glanced toward the locked controls. The corridor behind her was dry.

Instead of wiping the print away, she took out her phone.