“Why?” Riot says.
It’s the first word he’s spoken since we sat, and it drops into the room with the weight of a stone into still water. He hasn’t looked up. He’s leaned back in his chair, ankles crossed, a pen turning idle and hypnotic through the scarred valleys of his knuckles, the very portrait of a man with nowhere to be and no one to fear.
“Your partner ran off like a coward in the dark,” he goes on, conversational. “Seems to me the lead investigator on the case just became the only investigator on the case, and the only investigator hasn’t investigated a thing worth a damn since she got here.”
“He must have been threatened,” Hale snaps. “Soren wouldn’t simply…he was solid. Steady. There’s no version of him that just flees in the night unless someone made him. Who would possibly?—”
She stops.
Her eyes narrow, and they swing, slow and certain, to the man spinning the pen at my right hand.
“You threatened him.”
Riot doesn’t stop the pen.
“Nothing’s true till it’s proven true,” he drawls. “Or however the saying runs.”
“Innocent until proven guilty,” I supply mildly.
“That one.”
“She said she hated him.” Hale’s voice climbs. “Your—the patient. She looked right at him and said she didn’t like him, and not one week later he’s on a plane to the other side of the planet. You expect me to call that a coincidence?”
Riot shrugs, the pen never breaking its lazy rotation.
“If the trash takes itself out,” he says, “I don’t see how that’s anything to do with me.”
“That is not a denial,” Hale grates.
“It’s not a confession either, sweetheart.” Riot finally lifts his pale eyes to her, and the room temperature drops a degree at the lazy menace in them. “Tell you what. You find me a body, you find me a witness, you find me anything but a feeling in your gut, and I’ll sit real still while you read me my rights. Until then—” the pen resumes its turning “—a grown man chose a jobon another continent. Happens every day. People decide a place isn’t good for their health.”
I have to apply genuine effort to the project of not smiling, because this is far more entertaining than a homicide tribunal has any right to be, and because I know precisely what happened in the small hours of this morning.
Riot is the reason that man ran for the hills. There’s no question in my mind—our Omega looked at Soren Bishop and declared, in three flat words, that she found him distasteful, and Riot heard a death sentence and went to deliver it, and the only reason Bishop is on a plane instead of one of Silas’s tables is that the man was wise enough to choose the continent over the coffin.
Typical of him, the brute.
He’d have happily made the agent vanish and laid the disappearance at the feet of whatever phantom is doing the actual killing.
Tidy. Efficient. Appalling.
I find I don’t especially mind.
“Detective.” The CEO’s voice cuts back in, and it has changed register—gone silken and pointed, the tone of a man who has decided to end something. “I’ll say this once, as a courtesy. Your father has done a commendable job furnishing the bureau with an investigator of such…expertise. Such connections. Doors open for you that open for very few. With pedigree like that behind you, I’d assume you possess the elementary skill of reading a room that does not wish you in it.”
The blow lands exactly where it was aimed.
I watch it land, because watching things land is my trade, and I see the precise instant Hale understands what’s been done to her. He hasn’t insulted her competence. He’s done something far crueler—he’s reminded her, in front of the men she’s been trying to command, that whatever competence she has is beside the point, that the chair she’d have liked to be offered exists inher father’s name and not her own, that every door she’s walked through was unlocked by a key she didn’t cut.
It’s the oldest wound a capable woman in a borrowed seat can carry, and the CEO has pressed his thumb into it with surgical, unhurried malice.
Her jaw works.
For a moment I think she’ll fight—and some unexpected part of me, the part that recognizes a survivor when it sees one, almost wants her to. But the wound is too old and too deep, and instead she inclines her head in a small, stiff, furious bow, and turns, and is through the door before any of us can offer a single word.
She slams it behind her hard enough to rattle the panelling.
I find, to my mild surprise, that I don’t enjoy it.
