I start back toward the door.
“Accounting.”
Leone laughs under his breath and follows me inside.
By the time we return to the dining room, everything looks exactly as it should. The guests are still eating. The servers are still moving. The illusion remains intact.
That is the trick with power. The best use of it leaves no visible stain.
I retake my seat at the table as though I have been gone no longer than necessary. Leone settles behind me, unreadable again.
Across the room, Donald emerges from the back corridor looking like a man who has just seen the inside of his own grave. Even from here I can see that his hands are unsteady.
He spots Izzy almost immediately.
She is at the service station balancing three competing disasters at once, speaking to the florist replacement while checking a bill and signaling Amber for something at the bar. Efficient, composed, beautiful in the way she always is when she is too busy to remember she should be tired.
Donald approaches her.
I do not turn my head.
I do not need to.
From where I am sitting, I can hear them perfectly.
“Izzy,” he says, trying and failing to sound normal. “A word.”
Izzy looks up. “If this is another joke, I’m not in the mood.”
Donald actually flinches.
Interesting.
He lowers his voice. “There was… a payroll error.”
Silence follows those words.
Then, very flatly, “A what?”
“A payroll error,” he repeats. “Accounting issue. Some hours were misfiled.”
Izzy lets out a short laugh that has no amusement in it whatsoever. “That’s a creative way to say you tried to rob me.”
Donald’s eyes flick, involuntarily, toward my table.
She notices. Of course, she notices.
Izzy notices everything.
He tears his gaze away from me so fast it is almost comic.
“No one robbed anyone,” he says. “It’s fixed.”
I can hear the disbelief in her silence before she speaks again.
“Fixed how?”
Donald shoves the envelope into her hands.
