“You’re being ridiculous,” I say. “You were set to go nuclear if I hired them. Now you want to bully me into giving them an offer?”
“Ridiculous?” She tosses her head like a mustang fighting a bridle. “You think I’m being ridiculous?”
“You’re tired.” I rephrase. “You had a bad night. It’s no surprise you’re getting emotional.”
“Emo—” She cuts herself off before she proves my point. She swallows hard. She jams her hands into the pockets of my jacket, pulling the fabric close around her.
I was wrong before. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. Not always. Not now.
Glaring at me like she’s trying to melt my bones, she measures out her words. “You made every one of the Red Cap Raiders an Ice Knight but me. Why not me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit.” There’s no heat behind the word, just a simple statement of rejection. “Why not me?”
“What do you want?” I ask. “Should I make something up?”
“I want you to tell the truth. Why didn’t you make me an Ice Knight?”
I understand this matters to her more than any other fight we’ve had—more than my rules about cutting, about eating, about staying on the property. Somehow, this drills down to the very core of who she is, of who I am, of what we can be together.
I saw potential in the rest of her crew, and I wanted to study them closer. I made a business decision that has nothing to do with Kate, with who she is, what she believes, how she behaves.
“Don’t lie,” she says.
“I wasn’t going to?—”
“There. You’re doing it again. You look straight at me without blinking, just before you lie.”
I have a tell, and my wife’s the one who’s found it. I’m deeply embarrassed, like I’m fifteen again, and she caught me with my hand down my pants.
I wonder if Nutmeg knows, if she’s used it against me forever. I wonder if Shannon knew too, if she had a few seconds’ warning before I told the cops I ran her collection agency con.
Here, now, I close my eyes. I swallow hard. And this time when I look at Kate, I’m aware of every time I blink.
There’s an answer. It’s the truth.Atruth. Something I can deliver, careful and precise, like I’m nailing the lid shut on my own coffin. “I don’t like your code.”
There’s a moment when she processes what I’ve said. And then her face betrays her, the way it always does. She flushes, scarlet fury washing out the freckles across her nose. “Youwhat?” she asks.
“I don’t like your code.”
“My code is more efficient than?—”
I cut her off. She asked for the truth, and now that I’ve teased it out, I won’t hold back from delivering it. “It’s elegant. It’s beautiful. But you take too many risks. You rely on intuition.”
“Myintuitionwas enough to get Red Cap into Banque Wagner! If Mask hadn’t hesitated, we would have walked off with millions.”
“But he did hesitate, didn’t he? And your code wasn’t robust enough to recover. You’re all emotion. All fire. You have no discipline. No control. That’s why you got into a fight with MaskedMarauder after the raid.”
“I got into a fight with MaskedMarauder because?—”
She sees my mistake the same time I do. She’s staring at ascreen from Winter Reckoning. She’s learned that I own the game. But I only know about her fight with MaskedMarauder because I monitor every keystroke she’s made within my house.
“How long?” she asks.
“How long what?” My brain has gone into a search pattern, testing and discarding escape routes one by one. I’ll figure this out. I have to.
“How long have you been monitoring my accounts?”
