Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
The car slows. The driver’s voice comes quiet over his shoulder, we’re here, sir, and I lift my eyes, and the simplicity ends for good.
The press has the steps of The Res already, because a man like Richard Ericsson doesn’t die quietly and the vultures had the scent before the body cooled. There must be thirty of them banked across the lower steps in a loose dark crescent, cameras up, breath fogging in the cold, and the second the limousine noses to the curb they turn as one, the way a school of fish turns, and the noise of it reaches me through inches of glass and engineered quiet before Colton has even cut the engine.
I know what they see when the door opens. I’ve read the profiles, the ones that call me broodingly handsome in one breath and legendarily ruthless in the next, as though the two came as a matched set sold together. The financial pages have a favorite line about me, that I’ve never once walked away from a thing I wanted and never once kept a thing past the moment I stopped wanting it. They mean it as a warning to whoever has to sit across a table from me next. They aren’t wrong to. I built that reputation the way other men build wine cellars, deliberately, bottle by bottle, year by year, because a name that frightens people closes deals that charm never could. I’ve hollowed out three companies that trusted me and let the photographs of the wreckage do my negotiating ever since.
So when the door opens and they start shouting, the hunger in it has nothing to do with the dead man. It’s me they want. The cold one. The one the gossip pages swear has no soft place anywhere in him.
They’ve simply never watched me look at her.
I don’t look at them. I’ve trained myself out of it the way I’ve trained myself never to look at a tell across a table. Looking gives them something, and I am not in the business of giving things away for free.
I look at her instead.
She’s at the top of the steps, set a little apart from the cluster of staff and lawyers in their dark coats, and she’s turning toward the car the same way the reporters turned, except there’s nothing predatory in it. She’s pale. Even through tinted glass and across thirty feet of stone I can see the pallor, the swollen eyes, the chin held at an angle I recognize because I’ve worn it myself in rooms where I couldn’t afford to look as young or as frightened as I was. It’s the angle of a person doing a passable impression of tough. Someone who isn’t tough at all, who knows it, and who is betting everything on no one else in the crowd working it out.
I’ve met her exactly once. Our wedding day. Six months ago, in a judge’s chambers that smelled of furniture polish and old paper, with her dying father parked in a wheelchair by the window and Jeff standing witness and a vow I made because it came bundled with a hockey team.
I don’t know her. That’s the stone I’ve been carrying since the contracts closed. I married a woman who is a stranger to me, told myself it didn’t matter, and then spent half a year thinking about her at the wrong hours of the day. That, more than the dead man, more than the cameras, is the thing I still haven’t decided what to do about.
Colton opens my door, and the noise comes in like weather through a broken window.
“Mr. Flint! Mr. Flint, are you the new owner of the Waymakers?”
“What happens to the team now that Ericsson’s gone?”
“Mr. Flint, is it true you’ve been negotiating for control for over a year?”
I move through them the way I’d move through weather. Not rudely. Rudeness is a form of engagement, and I don’t engage. I simply walk, my coat catching the wind off the river, and the crowd parts the way crowds part for men who’ve stopped expecting to be stopped, microphones swinging after me like compass needles, and I climb the cold steps with my eyes on the one person up there who isn’t shouting anything at all.
She sees me coming. I watch the exact moment her composure decides it has held as long as it’s going to.
Then she’s moving, fast, down two steps and a third, and she hits me with the whole slight weight of her, and my arms close around her because there is nothing else on earth they could have done, and a woman I’ve traded perhaps two hundred words with in my life cries into the front of my coat as though I’m the last solid thing left in a world that came apart this morning.