I answer with the voice I use for Council business—flat, precise, the temperature of a surgical instrument.
"We have a situation in Montreal," Blackwood says. "Luc Ferrand."
Ferrand. A customs official the Order has used for years to facilitate the movement of certain assets through the port—nothing that would trouble a man without a conscience, which Ferrand never had. Six months ago, we learned he'd been approached by a rival syndicate. He accepted their money and began feeding them intelligence on our shipping routes, our schedules, our personnel.
Worse: he gave them the home address of David Letts, one of our logistics operatives. Letts has a wife. Two young children. The syndicate used the information to send a message—photos of Letts's daughters at their school, taken from across the street, delivered to his home in a plain envelope.
I handled it.
Not from a distance. Not through intermediaries. I flew to Montreal on a Tuesday, checked into a hotel on Rue Sherbrooke, and spent two days mapping Ferrand's routine. On the third night, I waited in the parking garage beneath his apartment building. He arrived at 11:40 PM, slightly drunk from a dinner he'd enjoyed on the syndicate's money.
I stepped out of the shadows and he saw my face and knew immediately why I was there. The Order doesn't send Council members for conversations.
He tried to run. He didn't get far.
I won't describe what happened in that parking garage. I'll say only that it took less than four minutes, and that Ferrand was alive when I left him, and that he will never walk without a cane again or hold a pen without pain. I'll say that I broke the hand he used to write Letts's address on a piece of paper and give it to men who photographed children.
I washed the blood off my knuckles in the hotel bathroom and flew home the next morning. I didn't feel anything. That's the part that should disturb me and doesn't. The violence exists in my memory as operational necessity—a threat identified, assessed, and neutralized.
"We have a new situation," Blackwood says. "Ferrand's contact in the syndicate. He's escalating. He's identified two more of our people and he's leveraging Ferrand's intelligence to build a targeting package."
"Then the contact needs to be dealt with."
"Abraham wants your assessment. Options and timeline."
"He'll have it by morning."
I hang up. The driver arrives. I get in the back seat and sit in the dark and feel the two halves of my life press against each other like tectonic plates.
An hour ago, I was standing in a gallery, looking at a sculpture made by a woman who transforms broken things into something beautiful, and I felt my chest crack open. Now I'm planning the neutralization of a man in Montreal who sells the addresses of children.
These are the same hands. That's the thing she doesn't know. The hands that want to touch her and the hands that broke Luc Ferrand's fingers one by one in a parking garage—they belong to the same man. There is no separation. There is no version of Damien Cross that can be extracted from the rest and presented as clean.
The car crosses into Manhattan. At home, I shower. The hot water does nothing for the feeling in my chest. I put on a robe and sit in my study and open the camera feed.
The fourth-floor light is on. She's home.
She's up there. In her small apartment, with the mattress on the floor and the lavender on the windowsill. Maybe she's changed out of the dress already. Maybe she's hanging it on the good hanger, smoothing the fabric.
Or maybe she's still wearing the jacket. Sitting on her bed, the sleeves covering her hands, the collar against her neck. My jacket, which has been against my skin all evening and is now against hers.
The thought is possessive and tender and obscene, and I let myself have it because refusing it would be like refusing to breathe.
I draft the assessment for Abraham. The syndicate contact in Montreal—a man named Tessier who has graduated from intelligence-brokering to active targeting of Order personnel and their families. Two options. The first is the clean route—cut his funding, burn his network, leave him isolated and irrelevant. Time-intensive but deniable. The second is what I did to Ferrand, except Tessier has escalated beyond Ferrand's level, and escalation requires a proportional response.
I type both options with steady hands. The same hands that held Jess Rowe's in a hardware store. The same hands thattook off a jacket and held it toward her on a dark street. The same hands that left Luc Ferrand in a pool of his own blood because he sold the safety of a man's children for money.
I look at the art on my walls. The mirror piece. The iron fist that might be a flower. And on the shelf, my mother's wren. The small bird, the bright eye, the winter branch.
The light in her window goes off. She's gone to bed.
I close the feed. Set the phone down.
She has my jacket. Which means she has to give it back. Which means I'll see her again, and the distance will be smaller, and the pretense will be thinner, and the thing between us will be closer to the surface.
I should be planning the next encounter. Managing the timeline. Controlling the variables.
But tonight I don't want to plan. Tonight I want to hold the feeling of her putting on my jacket. The look on her face—annoyed and cold and defiant and then, when the warmth hit her, something that looked like relief.
