There it is. The thing that doesn't belong.
I step out while the panel wraps the formal portion. Marchetti follows, pulling the conference room door shut behind us, and I walk to the window at the end of the hall and look out at the city without seeing it.
"You knew," I say.
Marchetti clears his throat. "We flagged it in the screening stage."
"And?"
"Her credentials are legitimately strong. The team felt it would be worth your time to make that determination yourself rather than filter her out before you'd seen her work."
He's right. I would have said the same thing. It still irritates me.
Dante De Luca. Founder of De Luca Global Logistics.
A man who has spent the last three years positioning his company as a competitor in the high-net-worth client protection space. Our space.
He's been circling the Aurelius contract for months. He's well-funded, well-connected, and morally flexible in ways that make him effective and exhausting in equal measure.
Now, his daughter is currently sitting in my conference room with a coffee stain on her blouse and the most ruthlessly accurate competitive analysis of my firm that I have heard from anyone outside a board room.
"She's estranged from him," Marchetti says. "Our background check was thorough. No professional contact in three years, no financial ties we could verify, limited personal communication by all accounts."
"Accounts change."
"They do," he agrees. He doesn't argue further. He knows better.
I stand there for another moment.
Down on the street below, a taxi cuts sharply into traffic and someone on a bicycle swerves and keeps moving, unbothered. The city absorbs everything. That's the only thing I have ever found genuinely comforting about it.
I think about the Aurelius contract.
The Legacy Shield Contract, that's what they're calling it in the industry, though the Aurelius Family Office Consortium hasn't given it an official name.
It's a ten-year exclusive agreement. Comprehensive family-protection and crisis-management coverage for twelve of the most significant private family offices in the world.
Intelligence coordination, physical security architecture, legal crisis response, compliance, financial protection infrastructure. Everything, all of it, unified under one firm.
If we win it, Ferretti Global Risk becomes the leading family-protection company in the world. Notoneof the leading.
The leading.
If we lose it, we remain very good. Respected. Profitable.
Very good has never interested me.
I turn away from the window.
"Tell Ms. Delaney to give her the NDA," I say. "I'll finish the conversation myself."
When I step back into the conference room, the panel has filed out.
Livia De Luca is still seated, turned slightly toward the window, her bag in her lap.
She isn't checking her phone or fidgeting. She’s watching the city with a worn, steady resolve that I catch for a split second before she notices me and quickly reins it in.
I take the seat across from her.
