Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
ANTON
The car pulls away from Keyes. The driver doesn’t speak. The harbour burns past the window in its usual blues and I close my eyes and I can still feel it.
Her hand on my chest.
She put her hand on my chest and she didn’t push. I gave her every reason to push. I stood too close, I dared her, I put my mouth near hers in a file room with fluorescent lighting and scattered tabs and I was playing the game I’ve played with every woman at every firm in every city where the underworld buys its legal cover, and she put her hand on my chest and she didn’t push.
I pour myself a drink from the bar built into the armrest. The glass is cold. The whisky burns. Neither sensation reaches the place where her hand was.
She was trembling.
I felt it through the file she was gripping, through the space between us, through the air itself. She was trembling and her eyes were bright and her chin was up and she told me she wasn’t for sale, and the way she said it, the crack in her voice on the word sale, wasn’t the voice of a woman running a negotiation. It was the voice of a woman who meant it.
Or an artist who has perfected the impression of meaning it. Because that’s what the best ones do. They tremble. They crack. They put a hand on your chest and don’t push, because the not-pushing is the hook, the not-pushing is what makes you believe, and I have believed before and it cost me more than I’m willing to remember.
My hands aren’t trembling. Not quite. Close. Close enough that I set the glass down before the driver notices.
I’ve read people for years. I’ve never been wrong.
But her heartbeat. When my chest was against her palm, her pulse was in my skin, and it was fast. Not performed-fast. Not I’m-running-a-scene-fast. It was the fast of a woman who is terrified and wanting and doesn’t know what to do with either, and I’ve never felt a pulse like that through performance.
I push it away. I push her away. Daisy Fletcher is her aunt’s project, a girl from Idaho wrapped in earnestness and colour-coded tabs, and the tremble was part of the package and the heartbeat was adrenaline and the not-pushing was strategy.
The whisky is gone. I pour another.
My phone buzzes. Not Alexei this time. An encrypted channel, text only, no sender ID. The message is three lines.
Second thread confirmed. Keyes internal. Financial records accessed from partner-level login. Timeline overlaps with Daniil.
Daniil. My father’s name in a text about a mole.
I set the phone down. The harbour burns. The whisky burns. And somewhere between the mole inside Keyes and the girl who put her hand on my chest and didn’t push, the investigation and the wanting tangle into a knot I can’t separate, and I understand with a clarity that tastes like copper that I am no longer in control of either.
Chapter 5
DAISY
I wear the ivory blouse.
I tell myself it’s because it’s clean, because everything else is in the laundry basket, because the ivory blouse is professional and appropriate and has nothing to do with the fact that Anton Almazov’s eyes tracked it from collar to hem in the conference room on Wednesday and I caught the tracking and I catalogued the tracking and I’ve been thinking about the tracking at two in the morning with my pillow over my face.
I’m at the office early. The coffee cup is on my desk. I drink it without throwing it away and I hate myself for that too.
He arrives mid-morning. Grey suit. No tie. Top button undone. He walks past my desk and his eyes find the blouse and his mouth does the half-lift and he doesn’t say a word, and the not-saying is louder than anything he could have said, and I grip my pen and stare at a spreadsheet I finished an hour ago.
At eleven, Kaye calls me in.
“There’s an event tonight at Ace Royale. The Almazov casino.” She’s standing at her desk, sorting invitations into two piles with the efficiency of a woman who does this often. “Mr. Almazov has requested you attend as his paralegal. It’s a networking opportunity. Several of the firm’s clients will be there.”
My stomach drops. “I don’t think—”
“The navy dress,” she tells me. “The one with the back. You’ll look beautiful.”
I don’t own a navy dress with a back. I own a navy dress that Kaye bought me recently that I’ve never worn because the back is open to the waist and I didn’t understand why my aunt would buy a paralegal a dress with no back until right now, standing in her office, understanding everything and nothing at the same time.
ACE ROYALE IS NOT A casino. Ace Royale is a cathedral built by men who replaced the cross with a diamond and the altar with a roulette wheel, and I’m standing in the entrance in my navy dress with my spine exposed to the air-conditioned air and I’m so far out of my depth that the depth has its own weather system.