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“And you wish to meet Mitchell looking like that?”
“What’s Mitchell going to do? Write a piece about how I’m being abused by my girlfriend?”
“Your girlfriend,” Woodrow says without inflection.
I sit myself down into my desk chair and throw Woodrow a look over my shoulder. “You know what I mean.”
“I’m quite certain I don’t.”
“She’s staying for now.”
“She’shurtyou, sir.”
I swivel around in my chair and cross my arms. “A little slap, Ned. What—you’ve never been with a feisty woman before?”
Woodrow’s face remains perfectly composed despite the underlying annoyance stiffening his tone. “I prefer to date women who will not endanger my life or visibly injure me.”
“You’re a wiser man than me, then.” I turn back to my screen and say over my shoulder, “Is the war room ready for my interview prep, then?”
The war room is a conference room on the fifth floor of my father’s offices in the heart of London. It’s where I go when I have lines to learn and a whole team of PR people to stress over the way I tend to come across as “unnerving” and “alienating”.
“It’s scheduled for tomorrow, sir. Your father will be in attendance.”
“Of course he will,” I say with a slight laugh. “Any attack on me is an attack on Novus; my father won’t stand for either. It’s a good day to be the Novus heir. Mitchell might find that he’s bitten off a lot more than he can chew.”
“Mitchell is interested in CHOKE, not Novus.”
“Stop worrying about Mitchell,” I tell Woodrow over my shoulder. “Every inch of paperwork has been run through with a fine-tooth comb and checked thrice over by our legal team. We’re ironclad, Ned.”
“With the utmost respect, sir,” Woodrow says, “you do not currently project the appearance of one who isironclad.”
I brush my cheek with a light touch. The bruise is an ever-present dull throb in my face, a reminder of what passed between Willow and me in the fencing salle. I’m not any more ashamed of it than I would be ashamed of a fencing injury received after underestimating an opponent. Shame is an unnecessary human weakness—pride, its limping child, all the more so.
“I highly doubt Mitchell will be concerned with my private life—and if he is, it’ll only be a distraction. Besides—ultimately, Ned—I care about Mitchell’s opinion of me about as much as I might care about the opinion of, oh, I don’t know, the spiders in my wine cellar.”
“Pride comes before the fall,” Woodrow says with ominous gravitas.
“It’s a good thing I have none.”
“What do you have none of?” A new voice, bold and sweet at the same time, reaches us from the door. “Balls?”
Woodrow turns his entire body stiffly around, his tablet clenched in his white-knuckled hands. Willow pushes through the door, a steaming cup of coffee in hand.
Today, she’s in fishnet tights, black denim skirt, a long-sleeved black band T-shirt, crudely cropped through the middle. Like me, Willow isn’t bothering to hide her injuries: her leg bandages are clearly visible through her fishnets, and her cropped top reveals glimpses of her bruised sides.
Not her scars, though. No matter what she wears, Willow is always careful to hide her arms, those gossamer stripes I can never unsee. The mystery of Willow, tallied like threads of silk on her skin.
“Good morning, Ms Lynch,” Woodrow says.
If Willow detects the blistering iciness in his tone, she’s not bothered by it. She gives Woodrow a little wave. “Call me Willow.”
An honour she’s never offered me. Interesting. She ignores me, eyes roving around the room, taking everything in. I have no doubt she’s making a list of notes in her head, storing them away until she can scribble them down in that sinister little notebook of hers. I should’ve been more careful to keep the door closed with her around. I make a note to ensure she can never gain access to my office ever again.
“Lynch, this is Edward Woodrow,” I tell her.
Like Woodrow, I don’t for one moment lift my eyes from her. Undeterred by the crushing weight of our combined gazes, Willow strolls over to the wall of cabinets and begins tugging on random drawers, finding them all locked.
“Hi, Eddie,” she says over her shoulder with a familiarity that makes Woodrow’s face grow pale with outrage. To me, she says,“What do you keep in these? The heads of all your previous wives?”
