“You said that about Gregor too.”
“I know. And I did give it to you. Eventually.”
“Eventually isn’t good enough anymore, Zane.”
He doesn’t argue with that either. He just nods once, the smallest possible movement, an acknowledgment rather than a promise, because we both already know how little his promises have been worth lately.
I turn and walk out of his office, and I don’t look back, and somewhere behind me I hear him not following, which is its own kind of answer. He’s letting me have the distance because he knows, the same way I know, that closing it right now would only be another decision he’s making on my behalf.
I go to my room. I sit on the edge of the bed where I was sitting twenty minutes ago, listening to my sister describe a fountain she has no idea is sitting inside a threat assessment.
I don’t cry.
I’m too angry to cry, and underneath the anger, there’s something colder and more exhausted, the tiredness that comes with loving someone who keeps proving, piece by piece, that loving him will always come with conditions I never agreed to.
26
ZANE
She comesto my office at nine, exactly when she said she would, and she sits down across from me without being asked, which she has never done before. Every conversation we have had in this room, she has stood. Tonight she sits, and I understand it for what it is. She is not here to argue. She’s here to receive something, and she wants both hands free to hold it.
I close the laptop in front of me.
“All of it,” she says. “Like you promised.”
“All of it,” I agree.
I start with Gregor, though she already knows the shape of that part. I tell her exactly what he passed and to whom, the restaurant meetings, the financial transfer, and the two-day window between the council announcement and the leak reaching Sorrel.
I watch her face while I say it, and she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t interrupt, just listens with a stillness I haven’t seen from her since the morning she told me she was pregnant.
“The Marchetti faction has had your full background for over three weeks,” I say. “Your work history, the Queens address, Lena’s medical situation, and the debt that started this. And the pregnancy, two days after I told the council.”
“I know that part.”
“What you don’t know is what they’re doing with it.”
She waits.
“They’re not interested in hurting you,” I say. “Not as an end in itself. A direct attack on you would bring the full weight of this organization down on them with no benefit attached. What they’re building instead is a position. Leverage they can use against me specifically, through you, because you and the child are the two things in my life I will not negotiate on.”
Something moves behind her eyes, quick, gone before I can fully name it.
“They want something from your operation,” she says. It isn’t a question.
“Almost certainly. I don’t know yet what specifically. Access to a route, a piece of territory, something that costs them less to ask for than war would cost them to wage. They’re patient. They’ll wait until they believe the threat is concrete enough that I’ll consider trading for it.”
“Would you?”
I look at her. “No.”
“Don’t answer that fast, Zane. Think about what you’re actually saying.”
“I have thought about it. I’m not going to hand the Marchetti faction a single piece of this organization in exchange for a promise from men who already proved, through Gregor, that promises mean nothing to them. Trading with them doesn’t make you safer. It makes you a precedent they’ll use again.”
She absorbs this. I watch her do it, watch the same methodical processing she brings to everything, the offshore documents, the council dinners, the architecture of a threat she didn’t ask to live inside.
“So what’s the plan?” she asks.
