“There won’t be a council dinner,” he says. “Not until this is resolved.”
I look at him. “You’re keeping me inside.”
“I’m keeping you safe.”
“Those are not the same thing.”
“In this situation, they are.”
The office holds that. I look at the document on his desk. My name is someone else’s legal language describing a future I didn’t choose in a life I didn’t choose, managed by a man who makes decisions about my safety without asking me, even as he’s the only person in this situation who has consistently shown up for me.
I hate that too.
I put the folder on the desk beside the document. I look at him across the width of it. He’s watching me with the focused attention he gives everything that matters, not performing patience, not managing me toward an outcome. Just watching.
“I want the full picture,” I say. “Not what you decide I need. All of it.”
“I know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Tonight,” he says. “I’ll give you all of it tonight.”
I nod. Turn toward the door.
I’m almost through it when he says my name. Not the way he says it to close a conversation. The other way. The way it sounds when he has decided to give something without being asked.
I stop.
“The succession document,” he says. “It protects the child. It protects you. Whatever else it is, that’s what it is.”
I stand in the doorway with my back to him. My hand is on the frame. The corridor outside is empty, quiet, the afternoon running its usual operations around us.
I don’t turn around. “I know,” I say.
I go back to my desk. I do the rest of the afternoon’s work. At six, I’m still at my desk when his office door opens. He comes out without his jacket. He looks at me.
“Come on,” he says.
I log off my computer. I follow him.
He tells me in the kitchen. All of it. Gregor, the leak, the Marchetti faction, the two weeks of inquiries. Roman’s intercepts. What the succession document is built to prevent. He tells me, standing at the counter with his sleeves pushed up and his voice at the register it goes to when he’s not performing anything for anyone, and I listen without interrupting because I asked for the full picture.
When he finishes, I look at the counter for a long moment.
“Gregor,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Someone on your own council.”
“Yes.”
I look up at him. He’s watching me the way he watched me in his office earlier, with the attention he reserves for things that matter. The kitchen light is low. The city outside the window is dark. We have been in this kitchen together enough times now that I’ve stopped noticing how strange it is to be here with him.
I stopped noticing a lot of things about being here with him.
He reaches out. His hand finds my jaw the way it found it in his office after the argument about Dario, the same deliberate gentleness that is somehow more disarming than everything else about him.
