“Transparency is not a weakness,” I say, because I need to say it to myself as much as to him.
“Sometimes it is,” he says, and that’s the truth he will not unlearn. It’s carved into him in a way no art can sand down.
He moves a fraction closer, not into my space, just close enough that he can lower his voice and I will still hear it. “When you go back down, you’ll make a left and you’ll feel a flash in your peripheral from the east wing. Don’t turn your head. It’s for a politician who doesn’t know yet that he isn’t going toget a microphone tonight. Lila is going to intercept a woman who thinks the words‘we’re partnering’make her sound smart. She’ll shut it down without you knowing. Jonah is going to almost agree to a commission that would put him on a ladder in a man’s office whose staff record everything. He’s going to change his mind because a man carrying a coffee will suddenly need directions.”
“You stage-manage other people’s lives,” I say.
“I keep them from becoming content,” he says.
“This is the same thing,” I counter.
“Not for them,” he says.
I touch the glass without meaning to. The cold bites the pads of my fingers and sends a clean line up my forearm like a reminder to breathe. The harbor looks like it’s waiting, not restless. A boat moves past slowly enough to be a picture.
He lifts a crystal glass and turns it between his fingers. He doesn’t pour. Scarred knuckles. Steady hands. I hate the part of me that reads competence into that and files it under useful, not seductive. I hate that he catches the flicker of recognition and doesn’t use it to push.
“You’re not going to block the door when I decide I’m done,” I say.
“No.”
“You’re not going to follow me down the stairs.”
“No,” he says again.
“And you’re not going to call me tonight.”
He waits a breath before responding. “No.”
My two minutes are up. I feel it in my bones more than in the air. If I keep standing here, I’ll start negotiating, and I don’t negotiate with men who control rooms. I step sideways toward the door in a way that reads as a choice, not a retreat. He doesn’t move to stop me. He doesn’t reach for the handle as if to open itfor me. He stays where he is, puts the glass down, and watches me.
I put my hand on the latch and pause. It’s a tiny thing, not about him. I don’t like leaving rooms without looking at the person I am leaving behind. I turn my head enough to catch his face in profile. The look there is not triumph. It’s something he keeps as close as he kept his name for a week too long: he wants an outcome. He wants me in it. He wants me to believe I chose it.
I open the door and walk out. The corridor breathes again when I cross the threshold. The classical track sounds like music instead of a pulse. When I step back toward the rope, the event noise floods in on a tide. I don’t look back. I don’t need to. I can feel his eyes without borrowing strength from them.
The elevator is dumb metal dressed up like an event. The mirror panels catch faces and stretch them.
The elevator ghosts to a stop. For a second, the mirror shows me as a woman with bright eyes and a mouth set like she’s going to do something hard on purpose. My breath fogs the steel. I look like a person who didn’t run. I look like a person who didn’t win either. I look like a person who is going to have to keep walking into rooms she didn’t build and not give them what they want.
I exhale, slow and deliberate, and whisper to the reflection because there’s nowhere else to put it.
“Game on.”
Chapter 12 – Cassian
The harbor looks like spilled metal when the wind drops.
I stand with my hands braced on the glass and feel the building’s heat fight the cold through my palms. Down on the water, a pilot boat cuts a white seam toward the breakwater, its wake folding and refolding until it disappears into gray. The tie is off. The top button gave up half an hour ago. The muscles in my jaw haven’t. They’re still locked around two seconds from tonight.
The apartment is quiet except for the server room’s hum bleeding under the floor. One wall is books out of habit. Another is empty because I like a surface without obligations. The far corner is the den. I built this floor to work like a ward because the first one I ever lived in smelled like tea, bleach, and failure.
I push off the glass and walk to the den. Motion wakes the screens. The middle display comes up with the last thing I left there: high-resolution shots of Aurora’s newest canvases, peeled from a camera we placed for stills, not stream, when the beam was open.
Her work reads differently at this scale. On the left, an image that passes as abstraction if you see it at a cocktail distance: lines in graphite under oil, a band of muted color along the bottom, a spiral of red tucked into the lower right quadrant. To anyone else, it’s tension on a plane. To me, it’s the staff hallway at Sanctuary Two mapped from a memory she shouldn’t have, with the spiral sitting exactly where the downstairs women’s bathroom is. I don’t need the spiral to tell me that. The geometry is enough.
I scroll and find another canvas of a doorway that’s all square and restraint until you look at the arch shadow. We use that marker—a short vertical nick in paint—inside the network to tell staff which doors lock from the hall and which from theroom. It isn’t public. We never wrote it down. We never told donors. We taught it on site, one-to-one, and we changed it when we had to.
I zoom until the pixels show their seams. The nick is there. It isn’t accident. She could have pulled the trick from any ward she’s ever seen. But the ratio is ours, and the way the baseboard runs dark then light is ours. She didn’t stumble on the pattern. She pulled it from a place near enough to our rooms to count.
