Dale Delray looks at Romee, then back up at me, and something in the overall geometry of the situation finishes calculating for him.
"We were just talking," he says.
"You were just talking," I repeat, and let the silence after it do the work. I've found that silence does a significant amount of work when you're my size and someone already knows they're wrong. "Then you're done."
He looks at me for another moment. Then he puts his hands in his pockets with the specific body language of someone choosing a graceful exit over a principled stand, nods once in a way that commits to nothing, and walks back up the path toward the main lodge without looking back.
I watch him until the path curves and he's gone from sightline.
Then I look down.
Romee has turned around to face me, clipboard still in a white-knuckled grip, and she is looking up at me.
"I had that handled," she says, and her voice is steady and sharp, which is a better performance than most people could manage right now.
"I know," I say, because she did. She was handling it. The tree at her back was a tactical choice, I recognized it, she'd reduced the angles he could approach from and was managing the situation with the resources available to her, which were limited and didn't include, for example, being six-foot-ten. "I handled it faster."
Her jaw works slightly. "You can't just loom at people until they leave."
"I wasn't looming. I was standing. The looming is incidental."
She exhales through her nose, this short sharp breath that's fighting a laugh she clearly doesn't want to give me, and drops her gaze to the clipboard for a moment while she reassembles the professional composure the last ten minutes have been steadily dismantling. She does it. She's efficient about it, the set of her shoulders, the tilt of her chin, the click of a pen she picksup from the clipboard clip and holds like a prop that helps her feel organised.
"Thank you," she says finally, and it costs her something to say it plainly without the defensive wrapper, I can tell by the small compression of her mouth around the words.
"I need to talk to you," I say, and the words come out more heavily than I intended, weighted with the thing I've been turning over in my mind since the moment I watched her handle that situation with nothing but tactical thinking and extreme will.
She looks up from her clipboard, her dark eyes sharpening with the particular attentiveness she reserves for potential logistical crises. "If this is about reassigning the afternoon kayak slots, I already told Brogan that the rotation is locked and we're not shuffling the teams around just because the marketing department thinks they need a competitive advantage?—"
"It's not about the kayaks," I interrupt, as the shift happens in real time. Her shoulders tense slightly, the professional mask she's been carefully reconstructing tilts at an angle that suggests she's recalibrating, reassessing what this conversation might actually be about. Something shifts in her expression, a subtle wariness that flickers across her features like shadow moving through water, present enough that I catch it, guarded enough that she clearly doesn't want me to.
She sets the clipboard down with deliberate care, as though she's placing a weapon on neutral ground, and waits.
The lake catches the last copper light behind her, and I'm standing in the shadow of the pines with the citrus scent back in range and the memory of her weight in my hands refreshed and updated by the last four minutes, and I am beginning to suspect that the rational, professional conversation I've planned is going to be considerably more complicated to deliver than I anticipated.
"It's about your agency," I say, and watch her face do something she doesn't mean to let it do.
"What about my agency," she says, and her voice is perfectly level, which is how I know she already knows what I found.
CHAPTER 5
ROMEE
He knows.
The words sit like cold metal, and I keep my expression neutral, to not let the panic rising in my throat translate into anything visible on my face. My fingers tighten fractionally around the clipboard I just set down, and I'm acutely aware that I'm still catching my breath from the encounter with Delray, that my heart is still racing, that I'm not at my best defensive capacity right now and Thrall is looking at me with those predatory amber eyes like he can see straight through the professional armor I'm trying desperately to weld back into place.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I say, and it's a mistake the moment the words leave my mouth because they sound exactly like what someone says when they know precisely what you're talking about and are buying time to figure out how to spin it.
Thrall's expression doesn't change. He just stands there, enormous and immovable in the dappled shadow of the pines, and waits with the specific patience of someone who has all the leverage and knows it.
I hate that he knows it.
"Your boss," he says, and his voice is that same low, deliberate rumble that makes every word feel like it carries extra weight, "has been systematically taking credit for your event concepts for the last eighteen months. The Nordic wellness corporate summit that won your agency the Stevenson account was your design. The immersive team-building retreat for Halcyon Industries that landed inEvent Planner Magazinewas your logistics framework. The charity gala that brought in three million dollars for the Renton Foundation was your donor outreach strategy."
My carefully constructed defenses crack under the pressure of hearing it all laid out so plainly, so clinically, like he's reading from a presentation deck that contains my entire professional humiliation formatted in bullet points.
"You went through my personnel file," I say, and my voice comes out sharper than I intended, edged with something that sounds too much like hurt when what I need right now is cold, professional anger.
