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Leo's green eyes met Vivienne's in the mirror.

Vivienne did not turn.

It was the kind of silence a person chose. Leo had chosen it. Vivienne had, by not turning, accepted it. In the mirror Leo's face was, as always, not giving anything; but the muscle at her jaw set once and held, the way Vivienne had begun, without consent, to read. Cedar, faintly, across the room. Vetiver closer. The two of them not quite breathing in time.

Vivienne watched Leo's green eyes looking at her in the mirror for five seconds.

Six.

Seven.

She was standing very still. Leo was standing very still. That was a fact about the room and also a fact Vivienne had chosen to allow, and she was aware, as the seconds passed, that she was choosing. In the mirror Leo's pupils had widened by a degree against the low lavatory light. The light was low, but that was not the light. Vivienne had trained for thirty years to read a man's pupils in a negotiation, and she knew the difference between the two things, and she did not permit herself to put a word on what she knew.

She shut off the tap.

"Mademoiselle Cole."

"Madame."

"Are you in here for a reason."

"A woman you do not know entered the corridor behind you. I am waiting until Colette has moved her."

"Mm."

Vivienne dried her hands. She did not turn. The heat at the base of her throat was not moving. Leo, in the mirror, had not moved either.

The proximity of Leo was doing things to her. She felt a tight unravelling low in her belly.

The second stall door was open. The sink was quiet. Somewhere down the corridor Colette was no doubt charmingly redirecting whatever stranger had wandered into a corridor she should not have been in. The stranger would not come in here. Leo knew that. Vivienne knew Leo knew that.

Neither of them moved.

In the mirror Leo's eyes moved, once, down Vivienne's back to the small curve of her waist and up again, and did not pretend the look had not happened, and did not apologize for it.

Vivienne felt the look across three feet of black marble and lavatory tile.

She turned her hand and put the towel down.

"I am going back," she said.

"Yes, Madame."

"You will walk behind me."

"Yes, Madame."

She walked.

Leo walked.

They did not speak again until the velvet drapery of the red lounge.

Back in the armchair, Vivienne picked up her Armagnac. Her hand was steady. Of course her hand was steady. She had been a woman whose hand was steady for thirty years and she was not going to begin tonight. Isabella looked at her over the rim of a glass and said nothing that required an answer, and Vivienne was briefly grateful to Isabella for the silence she would otherwise have been charged for.

At eleven-fifty her phone pulsed once in her pocket.

Not the Blackthorn channel. Not the committee channel. The short encrypted channel she used for her most private correspondence, which was a channel whose in-bound list had, for the last decade, contained exactly six names.