"It didn't."
"I'm not suggesting anything, Jude. I'm interested in your perspective. You were living in the area at the time. Did you follow the case?"
Kennedy thinks he's fishing. He has no idea he just opened a door he can't close.
"I didn't follow it," I say. "But I know all about it."
His throat moves as he swallows. The pen has gone still between his fingers, and his pulse jumps at his temple. This is the closest I've come to honesty in three years, and the part of him that isn't blinded by ambition knows it.
"I think," he says, "that you're trying to tell me something."
"I've been trying to tell you something for three years, Kennedy. You just haven't been listening."
I lean forward. Not much—just enough to shift the distance between us, to remind him that the bolted-down furniture and the guard outside the door don't mean what he thinks they mean.
"Harold Devins was a philanthropist," I say. "Donated to children's hospitals, sat on nonprofit boards, gave speeches about corporate responsibility. The newspapers called him a pillar of the community."
"I remember."
"Do you remember what else he was?"
Kennedy doesn't answer.
"He beat his wife. For eleven years, every time a deal went wrong or a board meeting didn't go his way. Margaret Devins wore long sleeves in July and told everyone she was clumsy." I watch Kennedy's face as I speak, reading every shift in his expression. "The foundation photo—the one that ran in every paper after his death—showed him sitting at the head of his dining room table. Mahogany, eighteen feet long, built to make everyone who sat at it feel small."
"Jude—"
"He thought he was king of that table. King of his house, king of his company, king of Margaret's broken ribs and fractured wrists. Nobody ever told him different because nobody could."
The silence in the room is absolute. Kennedy's breathing comes too fast, too shallow. The fluorescent lights hum. Footsteps pass in the corridor outside.
I feel his fear.
"I sat across from him for four hours," I say. "In that dining room, at that table. Watched him realize, piece by piece, that being king of a table doesn't matter when someone bigger decides to take the throne."
Kennedy's hand moves toward the panic button under his desk—a twitch, an aborted gesture—before he forces it back to the armrest.
"Around hour three, he stopped looking down at me. Started looking up. That's how you know it's over—when the entitlement cracks and there's nothing underneath but the same terror everyone else feels."
"Frederick." Kennedy's voice is hoarse. "Your father."
"Seventeen men who looked like him, talked like him, carried themselves like him. All practice. Frederick was the end goal."
He reaches for the button this time. Doesn't try to hide it.
"Sit back," he says. The authority he's cultivated for decades is crumbling at the edges.
I could be on him in two seconds. Less, maybe—the desk is wide but not wide enough, and his chair is positioned wrong. Three years of sessions and he still doesn't understand basic spatial dynamics, still in the wrong spot every time.
His hand is on the button but he hasn't pressed it. The door is twelve feet behind me. The guard's response time, based on the seventeen drills I've observed, averages nine seconds.
I could do a lot in nine seconds.
"There's a self-assessment form," Kennedy says, his voice steadier now, clinical again. "I need you to complete it before our next session. Standard protocol for the board review."
He reaches for a folder on his desk, leaning across the space between us without thinking about it. His throat is right there. Close enough that I could feel the pulse under his jaw if I reached out.
The count runs.
