Page 22

I was standing at the window in yesterday's slip, watching the Blackwood estate's grounds staff move through the early morning with the silent coordination of people who were definitely not just grounds staff, when the knock came.

I did a quick assessment. Hair — acceptable. Lips, already slightly parted. Slip — doing what God and a lack of better options intended.

I pulled the door open. Not Magnus. Addie.

She was holding a garment bag in one hand and a pair of heels in the other. "Get dressed, bitch. We're going to work."

I took the garment bag. "That's not the line, Regina."

"You're such a Cady." She pushed past me into the room. "The suit is Loro Piana. Mei Ling picked it. Don't ask me how she knew your size."

"We're going to the office? I thought it was too dangerous."

Addie made a shooing motion and huffed a breath. "The boys aren't back. It's Monday morning. Vidar knows better than to stand between me and a skyscraper. Besides, we'll have a detail on us at all times."

I couldn't admit to my best friend that I was stalling because I wanted her brother-in-law to come back and kiss me lying down. That was not boss bitch behavior. So I slipped into the dress, which hugged my curves perfectly, and stepped into the shoes, which were my perfect size. Twenty minutes later I was dressed, heeled, and standing in the Blackwood kitchen while Mei Ling pressed an honest to god lunch box into my hands. Except it contained breakfast.

Addie and I moaned indecently in the car over the breakfast sandwiches Mei Ling had prepared for us. They were built on thick slices of milk bread, toasted to a perfect gold, with a smear of something that tasted like ginger and fermented black beans that had no business being on a breakfast sandwich and was absolutely the reason the breakfast sandwich worked. Between the slices was a fried egg with a yolk that ran into the nooks and crannies, caramelized scallions, and thin-sliced Wagyu beef that had been seared for what I estimated was approximately thirty seconds on each side. It was still pink at the center in a way that should have bothered me and didn't. I'd always preferred my meat blue-rare with a sear on the outside but red at the center. The fat was rendered just enough to be silky against the tongue; the beef so tender it barely needed chewing.

"Where's Magnus?"

Addie paused for exactly half a second. "Handling things."

"What things?"

She reached over and straightened my collar, which didn't need straightening. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but the less you know right now, the better."

I gave her The Look. The one we'd perfected over seven years of watching men in expensive suits try to hide money in places they thought we wouldn't find it.

"I know how that sounds coming from me. I hated it too when they said it to me. And then I found out what I didn't know, and I understood why they'd said it."

I looked out the window at the estate disappearing behind us. The tree line gave way to the long private road that eventually became a real road that eventually became the city. The two men in front said nothing. One of them was tracking the mirrors with the systematic attention of a man you did not want to follow. When the car pulled up to the Sterling building forty minutes later, Addie put her hand on my arm before I could reach for the door.

"Don't try to slip your detail," she warned, with the tone of a woman delivering information she had learned the hard way. "These wolves don't play around. They are not your bodyguards. They are your perimeter. There's a difference."

"What's the difference?"

"A bodyguard keeps things from getting to you. A perimeter keeps you from getting to things." She squeezed my arm once.

I got out of the car. And looked up.

They were already halfway through it. A crew of workers on scaffolding, removing the letters of the old sign. Below the gap where Sterling & Associates had been, a new sign was going up one letter at a time. The chrome caught the morning light.

ODHIAMBO, BLACKWOOD & ASSOCIATES.

My name. First. On a building in Manhattan.

I stood on the sidewalk for a moment longer than was professional. Okay. Several moments.

The two wolves from the car materialized on either side of me at a distance that was close enough to be a statement and far enough to be deniable. I ignored them. I looked at my name going up in chrome letters on the side of a building I was about to walk into as its Chief Executive Officer.

Petronella Odhiambo. First generation American. I had grown up in a one-bedroom in Brooklyn where the heat worked maybe sixty percent of the time and my mother's idea of career advice was be so good they can't ignore you, baby, and my grandmother's advice was make them say your name correctly.

They were saying my name. In chrome. On a building in Manhattan.

I was not going to cry on a public sidewalk. I straightened my jacket. As I stepped inside the building, a thought arrived: If Magnus Blackwood was putting my name on a building, he couldn't think I was in that much danger. You didn't invest in chrome signage for a liability.

The halls were empty as I stepped off the elevator. Addie and I were always the first in and the last to leave. I had almost asked her to walk in with me today, but she had her own empire to run as a new partner at Blackwood Holdings.