She looks at me for a long moment. The office holds the silence between us. Outside the window, the city has reached its midday volume, all traffic and construction, and the low, constant noise of ten million people doing their Tuesday.
She breathes out once. “If something happens to her—” she says.
“Nothing is going to happen to her.”
She picks up her bag. Walks to the door. Stops with her hand on the frame and her back to me. I watch the line of her shoulders do something. Not relax. Adjust. The way a person adjusts when they set down something they have been carrying since the night before.
She leaves without looking back.
I listen to her footsteps down the corridor until I cannot hear them anymore.
Then I pick up the phone.
Roman answers before the second ring.
“Dario Vasca,” I say. “Forty-eight hours.”
“Understood.”
I put the phone down.
I open the separate folder again. The photograph is the same one it was this morning—Gregor at a table in a Midtown restaurant, leaning forward, saying something to a man named Sorrel.
I put the photograph beside Dario Vasca’s flag on the desk in front of me.
Dario Vasca has been making contact outside his usual territory for three weeks. Eight months ago, he gave money to a woman named Lena Varas, who is the sister of the woman I chose for a contract that nobody outside my innermost circle knew about until five weeks ago.
Gregor has known about Celine since the first council dinner. He has been working against her since before the dinner was over. He had lunch with a man connected to the Marchetti faction four days ago.
The picture is not yet complete. But I have built enough structures in my life to know when the foundations of one are already in the ground.
15
CELINE
I know betterthan to ask Roman.
I know this, and I still find myself watching him across the office on Wednesday morning, looking for something in the way he moves and the calls he takes. He gives me nothing. He never gives me anything. That is what Roman is for.
I go back to my screen.
The work helps. It always helps. I’ve been managing on limited resources for long enough that I know how to use a full inbox and a complicated schedule as a wall between myself and the things I cannot control. I know Zane is handling it. I know because he said he would, and he doesn’t say things he does not mean. That’s one of the very few things I’m certain of about him.
What I’m not certain of is how it’s handled, what it costs, and what it leaves behind.
I think about this more than I want to.
Wednesday evening, I’m on the couch with my laptop when Zane comes through the penthouse. He doesn’t stop. He goes to his office, and the door closes, and I hear the low sound of a call starting behind it. I look at the door for a moment. Then I look back at my screen.
This is the thing about living in his space. You become attuned to it against your will. The sounds of him moving through rooms. The difference between the penthouse when he’s in it and when he’s not, which I noticed within the first week and haven’t been able to unnotice since.
I don’t examine this.
I close my laptop and go to bed.
On Thursday, I pass him in the corridor outside the conference room, and he looks at me the way he looks at me when there’s something behind it that he’s not going to say. I look back. Neither of us stops walking.
I get to the elevator, press the button, stand there for three seconds thinking about the look, then step in and go downstairs. The smell of the coffee cart on the ground floor hits me before I reach it, stronger than usual, and my stomach turns in a way I attribute to the fact that I haven’t eaten properly since Wednesday. I buy a bottle of water instead. I come back up and work.
