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Three stories down, four floors below that, past marble and scaffolding and a corridor she had no idea was already watched around the clock, Romily Devlin was packing up her tools for the night, unaware that a man who wanted to own what she could do had run out of reasons to wait.
Norden intended to make sure he ran out of everything else first. No matter the cost. No matter what it took. He’d spent eight hundred years being patient about things that didn’t matter nearly this much, and he found, standing there with the city spread out indifferent below him, that he had none of that patience left over for this.
EIGHT
ROMILY
The bar sat two streets over from the studio, dim enough to flatter everyone in it and loud enough that nobody’s business carried past their own table. The bartender knew her order without asking. That was the whole appeal — nobody here cared what she did for a living or who she was doing it for.
Jessa had claimed the corner booth, phone out, thumb moving at true-crime-forum speed, occasionally muttering a suspicious timeline detail to nobody at all. Marco arrived minutes later in a jacket that cost more than Romily’s monthly studio insurance, shook rain off one sleeve with the wounded dignity of a man personally betrayed by weather, and spun a chair around backward before dropping into it, arms crossed over the backrest like a man settling in for a show he’d bought tickets to. Lila came in last, exactly on time, bag set down at her feet with the precision of a woman who never misplaced anything, including an argument.
“You’re here early.” Romily slid into the booth, dropping her bag onto the seat beside her. “That’s never good.”
“I’m on schedule, precisely. You’re the one suspicious about punctuality.” Lila signaled the server without looking away from Romily’s face, two fingers raised in a gesture so precise it looked rehearsed, possibly because it was. “Sit. Talk. We order after the confession.”
“There’s no confession, none whatsoever.”
“There’s always a confession, without fail.” Marco leaned forward over the chair back, chin on his folded arms, eyes narrowed like a man reading a room he already knew the ending of. “You texted the group chat ‘nothing to report’ four times this week. Nobody says nothing four times unless there’s an enormous amount.”
“That’s not how texting works, and you know it isn’t.”
“That’s exactly how texting works.” Marco flagged the server, ordered for the whole table without consulting anyone, and spun back around to face her properly, chair scraping the floor loud enough that the table beside them glanced over. “Now. From the top. Don’t skip anything. I’ll know if you skip something.”
The first round hadn’t even landed before Jessa leaned across the table, chin on both hands, eyes locked on Romily like a woman who’d been waiting all week for this moment and wasn’t about to let it slip past her.
“Go.”
“There’s nothing to—”
“Go.”
Romily grabbed the drink menu for an excuse to occupy her hands and gave up on it in four seconds flat.
“He’s controlling. He’s intense. He has a way of looking at me that I’d call, clinically, alarming.” She counted it off on her fingers without meaning to, like she was reading her own deposition back to herself, heat climbing her neck the whole time she talked. “He assigned security to follow me home without telling me. I noticed the same SUV for six blocks and finally asked him about it, and he looked at me like I’d asked why the sun comes up. Like of course there’s a car. Like it’s a fact about the world, the way weather’s a fact about the world, non-negotiable and wholly out of anyone’s hands but his.”
Jessa set her phone down, screen-up, the true-crime forum forgotten. Marco’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth and stayed there, suspended, abandoned in favor of the drama currently unfolding two feet from his face.
“So you’re obsessed.” Jessa didn’t even try to hide the delight, leaning back with the satisfaction of someone whose theory had been handed to her, gift-wrapped, no assembly required whatsoever.
“I am not—”
“You just gave a six-sentence dissertation on his eye contact, unprompted, with feeling.” Marco slapped the table, rattling every glass on it hard enough that the server two tables over glanced their way. “That’s not a crush report, Romily. That’s a thesis defense. You had an outline.”
“I didn’t have an outline.”
“You had an outline.” Lila didn’t look up from the cocktail list, a worse response than if she had looked up directly.
“I organized my thoughts. That’s different.”
“It’s the exact same thing with a better publicist.” Marco ate the fork’s original cargo, chewing with the satisfaction of a man who’d made his point and intended to let it sit there, unchallenged, a monument to itself. He raised his water glass an inch off the table, a private toast to his own victory, and set it back down without drinking from it.
Romily grabbed the nearest exit from this conversation — a running commentary on the installation’s structural drawings — and sprinted for it like the booth itself was on fire. Load calculations. The northeast bracket. The way Adebayo’s firm had underquoted the steel by nine percent. She talked for four straight minutes about tension ratios in suspended glass, hands cutting the air, and to Jessa’s enormous credit, she let the whole thing run without once interrupting.
“The panel test came out extraordinary, by the way.” Romily gestured with her glass, warming to a subject with a clear right answer. “Warm light, self-generating almost, like the glass had opinions. I photographed it four ways and none of them captured what it actually looked like. I might go back tonight, try again, get it while the light’s right.”
“Fascinating.” Lila set that aside for later, the way you’d set aside evidence, and took a slow sip that communicated an entire paragraph of skepticism without a single word. “Keep going.”
“I’m not avoiding anything.”
