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"I have a human-resources process."
"Shorten it."
"Leo."
"I am telling you, Madame, as the stranger on retainer, that if you want to stop losing pieces of your empire to Lara Kossek you are going to have to take the people in this organization who still answer to her and move them out of it this week. Not next month. Not pending review. This week."
Vivienne's hand, on the closed ledger, pressed flat.
"Is that what you came to my study to say?”
"Yes."
"That I do not know how to run my company?”
"That is not what I said."
"That is what you said."
"It is not."
"You said I have people with links to her. Of course I have people with links to her. I have fifteen thousand employees in four countries and a board sitting on public scrutiny and a regulator about to announce an audit in the second quarter, and you walk into my study on a Tuesday morning and tell me to shorten my legal process because you, a woman with a firearm and a month on the file, believe there is a trio. Is that correct."
"Yes."
"Get out."
"No."
Vivienne stood up.
She stood up in one movement, as she had always sat down, without the hand on the desk she did not need, and her grey dress fell clean at the knee, and her pulse was visible for half a second at the side of her jaw and was gone.
"Get out of my study."
"No."
"Mademoiselle Cole."
"Madame."
"Get. Out."
Leo did not move.
Vivienne came around the desk.
She was furious. Leo had seen her move through seven meetings in five weeks and had not, once, seen her move like this, which was without the small smoothing pass at the front of a jacket and without the steady breath at her ribs. She came around the desk and stopped at a foot and a half, and her grey-blue eyes were holding the same mark the bruise at her collarbone was — the one Leo's mouth had put there at half past ten the night before.
Leo's body did a thing it was not supposed to do in a client's study at eleven on a Tuesday.
It did it anyway.
"Vivienne."
"Do not call me that.”
"You are beautiful when you are angry."
