To put this to the test, that night, dinner begins without her.
This is not an accident.
She knows the schedule as well as I do, knows the etiquette of punctuality as a show of force.
The head of security sits to my right, two of my best at the far end, one eye on their plates, the other on the doors.
The dining room is too large for the gathering, echoes crawlingover the lacquered walnut table, the tap of utensils a Morse code for caution.
She enters twelve minutes late, the hush preceding her like a herald.
The dress she wears is simple in design—no lace, no shimmer, no embellishment—but the fit is something else entirely, a forensic act of tailoring that traces the length of her spine with surgical exactness and sculpts her hips into a geometry too provocative to be ignored.
The fabric clings in all the right places and none of the wrong ones, framing her breasts with just enough tension to draw the eye, to hold it, to make a man imagine them in his hands without needing to see a single inch of skin.
Her skin catches the light without help, not powdered or burnished but incandescent, the kind of glow that belongs to women who understand the full cost of beauty and wield it anyway.
She walks like she has been sculpted rather than born, the curve of her waist visible even beneath the high seam of the dress, the dip of her collarbone like the mouth of a promise she hasn't made yet.
And God help me, I feel it—that low punch of arousal, hot and heavy and immediate, rising fast and brutal behind my zipper with the kind of urgency I haven't felt in years, the kind that has nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with the sheer fact of her.
I shift in my seat, adjusting subtly, masking it with a sip of whiskey, but the damage is done.
I am hard.
Fully.
Painfully.
And it has nothing to do with what she's said—she hasn't even opened her mouth—and everything to do with the way that fucking dress molds to the curve of her body, with the way her breasts rise and fall beneath the silk as if she's breathing just to keep me on edge, with the way her hips tilt when she turns her head to speak to no one at all, like a dance choreographed only for me.
She is not flirting.
She is not performing.
And that, more than anything, makes it worse.
She knows I'm watching.
And she lets me.
The room waits for me to signal acceptance of her arrival.
I nod, just enough, and she glides into the seat at my left, arranging her napkin with the precision of a surgeon.
The first course is served.
The chef, sensing the tension, sends a fleet of silent servers, all drawn from the Crowley side.
Even the plates are heavy, designed to withstand a sudden impact.
Conversation is soft, perfunctory.
The men discuss shipments, the blackout at the Docks, the price of Albanian muscle.
She listens, hands folded in her lap, chin down but ears pricked.
Halfway through the meal, the youngest enforcer—a recent graduate from pipe bombs to spreadsheets—mentions the increased traffic at the northern checkpoint.
