Kaye’s mouth opens. Closes. Her hands in her lap grip each other, knuckles white, and I can see the calculation happening behind her eyes: what lie will work, what angle, what versionof the truth can she offer that will protect her position and her career and her relationship with Jezebel and the architecture of deception she’s built around her own niece.
“Don’t,” I tell her. My voice is low and even and carries no warmth. “Don’t calculate. Don’t strategise. Don’t find an angle. I will know. I read people for a living, Kaye, and I’ve just come from the apartment of a young girl who told me the truth three times and I didn’t believe her, and the reason I didn’t believe her is sitting in this chair. So I am going to ask you once more. Did. She. Know.”
Kaye breaks.
Not dramatically. Not with tears or theatrics. She breaks the way structures break when the load-bearing wall gives: all at once, from the centre, the professional composure collapsing inward until what’s left is a woman in her fifties sitting behind a desk at six in the morning with her hands shaking and her glasses sliding down her nose and the truth falling out of her mouth in pieces she’s been holding together for years.
“She didn’t know.” A whisper. “Daisy didn’t know anything. She thought it was a real job. A real firm. I—I needed the client relationship. You’re the biggest retainer this firm has ever held. Jezebel was pressuring me to secure you personally and I didn’t have anyone available and Daisy was here, and she was young and pretty and I told myself she’d figure it out. I told myself she’d understand. I told myself she’d play along because that’s what everyone does, everyone plays along, and I didn’t—”
She stops. Her hands come to her face.
“You didn’t what.”
“I didn’t think you’d actually—” She can’t finish. She can’t say it. She can’t say: I didn’t think you’d fall for her, I didn’t think it would go past a dinner, I didn’t think my niece would end up in your bed believing you cared about her while you were running an experiment on her body.
I stand in her doorway and I let the silence do what my voice cannot.
“She didn’t figure it out,” I tell her. My voice cracks. The first crack, the first fracture in the composure I’ve been holding since I walked out of Daisy’s apartment. “She was exactly what she said she was. And I destroyed her because you lied.”
Kaye flinches. A full-body flinch, as if the words struck her physically, and I want to feel satisfaction and I feel nothing. Nothing except the memory of a girl who smiled at me in the aftermath, uncertain, hopeful, shy, and the smile was real and I missed it and there is no version of this confrontation that gives me that smile back.
I dismantle her.
Not with violence. I don’t touch her. I don’t raise my voice. I sit down across from her desk, the same chair Daisy sat in on her first day, and I explain to Kaye Fletcher in clinical, exacting detail what is going to happen to her career. The retainer is terminated. The referrals I’ve made to Keyes from other clients will be withdrawn by end of business. The professional connections she has cultivated through the Almazov name will receive calls this week from people she cannot afford to lose. None of this is illegal. None of this is violent. All of it is the methodical, systematic annihilation of a woman’s professional life by a man who has the resources to do it and the patience to make it thorough.
When I finish, Kaye is grey.
I stand. I button my jacket. I walk to the door.
“Anton.” Her voice behind me. Broken. “She’s my niece. I love her.”
I stop. I don’t turn around.
“Then you should have protected her from this place. Instead, you gifted her to it.”
I leave.
Her apartment is empty.
I drive there from Keyes. I take the stairs two at a time. I knock and there is no answer and I knock again and the door opens because it’s unlocked, still unlocked, the same unlocked door I walked through last night, and the apartment is dark and the bed is stripped and the bookshelf is half-empty and the cardigan is gone from the chair.
She packed one bag. The landlord tells me this in the lobby, a small man with kind eyes who doesn’t know who I am and doesn’t care. One bag, that morning, before dawn. She paid through the month. She didn’t leave a forwarding address.
I call everyone. I call contacts and associates and security teams and people who owe me favours and people who owe my brothers favours and I burn through every resource I have and none of them can find a girl from Idaho who left Monaco with one bag before the sun came up.
Blythe finds me.
I don’t know how she gets my number. I don’t know how she knows to call. She calls at midday, hours after I sat on Daisy’s bed with my hands shaking, and her voice on the phone is hard and cold and carries the specific contempt of a woman who has seen a powerful man ruin something innocent and isn’t impressed.
“She went home. Idaho.”
I close my eyes.
“And if you have any decency left,” Blythe tells me, “you won’t follow her.”
The line goes dead.
I don’t follow her.
