So I follow him. The way I already know in my bones I’m going to keep following him, because I’m still learning, minute by awful minute, exactly how much I’ll forgive a man I’m no longer sure ever wanted me at all.
He’s already standing at the long window when I reach the office, his back to me, a dark unmoving shape against the gray morning hanging over The Res and the river beyond it.
“Shut the door,” he says, without turning around.
I shut it gladly. If he’s going to say more terrible things to me, I would rather no one else in this building hears them, would rather the whole place go on holding its picture of their princess and her perfect marriage just a little while longer.
“I want you to give me an heir.”
The words arrive so far outside anything I’d braced for that for one full second I’m certain I’ve misheard him, that the night without sleep and the morning without mercy have finally cost me my grip on my own mind.
Then he turns from the window, and his face is a stranger’s face, and he finishes it.
“And then we can go our separate ways.”
Chapter Four
It’s an act, Flint. Don’t forget it.
I have to keep saying it to myself in the quiet of my own office, because she is making it very hard to remember.
She’s in one of the two leather chairs on the wrong side of my desk, the supplicant’s side, the side built an inch and a half too low, except she’s made herself smaller than even the chair intended, knees pressed together, hands folded in her lap, her whole body drawn down into something that looks like it would come apart in my grip if I so much as raised my voice. She still has her coat on. She came straight here from the corridor and the elevator and she never took it off, and the morning’s crying has left her pale and impossibly young, and the sight of her like that goes in under every guard I have and turns, and every animal instinct I own is shouting at me to come around this desk and gather her up off that low chair and tell her not one word of what I am about to say to her is true.
An act.She had her head resting on Barrymore’s shoulder on a park bench yesterday. She has spent two months laughing up into that man’s face while she whispered the words to me each morning with her own soft mouth at my door. The fragile shape folded into the leather is the very same woman the whole citystood and watched choose the golden boy, and if I let the picture of her trembling come apart undo me now, I will deserve every single thing that comes after.
So I keep my voice level, the way I keep my voice level across any table where I mean to take something, and I begin.
“It’s been six months. I think it’s time we ended this farce.”
She flinches like I’ve struck her across the face. I file the flinch away under performance and make myself go on.
“Freedom comes at a price, though. I need an heir, and I’ve no intention of marrying anyone else to get one.”
She shakes her head slowly, side to side, as though if she does it gently enough the words might rearrange themselves into something that makes sense. “I don’t understand. Why are you suddenly?—”
“What other explanation do you need?” I let the boredom slide into my voice, the cruelest thing I own, the same cold finality I’ve used to end careers from this exact chair. “I’ve grown tired of you. I want out. Only not without an heir first.”
“Was it really all a lie to you?”
Her voice cracks straight down the middle of the sentence, and I have to turn my eyes to the window over her shoulder, to the gray river and the gray sky stacked above it, because her face is about to cost me something I cannot afford to spend in front of her.
“We both had our fun,” I tell the glass. “But did you truly imagine it would last? Did you imagine I’d be content, at the end of it, with someone like you?”
Someone like you. The lie is so total it’s nearly funny. There has never in my life been anyone like her, and that is the whole of the catastrophe, the entire reason I’m sitting here doing this. But she doesn’t know that, and she never will, because the version of me that might have told her died somewhere in the cold ground between a cemetery and a dream, and the man left holding thedesk has exactly one weapon left in the drawer and fully intends to use it on her.
“Why are you being so cruel?” she whispers.
“The truth usually is.” I let myself ease back into my chair as though I’m bored, as though my own pulse isn’t going hard against my collar. “Now stop wasting my time. Do we have a deal?”
And here it is, the moment I’ve steered this whole conversation toward, the trap sitting open between us with its jaws back. I’ve told her she’s free. I’ve told her I’m finished. I’ve laid out the exit she ought to be leaping for with both hands, a clean end and a settlement more generous than any court would grant her and the golden boy waiting in the wings the entire city picked for her in the first place. All she has to do is say yes, give me a child, and walk out into the better life everyone agrees she should have had.
She lifts her eyes to me, and her chin does the brave thing it always does in the half-second before it crumples, and she says the only words in the language that can keep her.
“I can’t give my baby up.”
They’re exactly the words I expected. I know her well enough, even now, even with Nolan’s photographs burning a hole in my desk drawer, to have known she would never hand a child over to a man like the one I’m playing. I built the entire trap on that one certainty.
And I still feel the relief slam into me hard enough to drive the breath clean out of my chest, and I have to hold my own face still by main force so she won’t see what her answer has done to me. Because those six small words are the key to her cell, and I have just turned it on her, and the worst and most shameful truth of my entire life is that I needed to hear them. I need her to stay mine. I would burn the franchise and the fortune and the name my father never gave me to the ground before I’d let herwalk out that door and into Barrymore’s car, and I will die before I let her see one flicker of it.
