Long enough that I start to regret asking.
Then: "Don't make me be honest with you." He says it quietly, looking at the desk. Not away from me — at the desk, which is somehow different. "Not yet."
The room is very still.
"What does that mean?" I ask.
He looks up. His eyes are the flat steel gray I know — but there's something behind them tonight that I can't name and that he's clearly working to contain.
"It means I'm not ready," he says. "And until I am, I need you to let me have the silence."
I look at him for a long moment.
"You have until the Hamptons," I say.
Something moves in his face. Not a smile. The precursor to a smile, maybe — the ghost of one, acknowledged and set aside.
"That's not how?—"
"I know," I say. "But I'm setting a deadline anyway."
I walk out of the study.
In the corridor, I press the back of my head against the wall and close my eyes and breathe.
Not yet,he said.
Not never.
The difference between those two words is the crack in the marble I've been circling all week, and I've just jammed my finger into it, and I should absolutely stop.
I don't stop.
My room is dark when I get there and I don't turn on the light. I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark and I do what I do when I can't not think: I think carefully.
Not yet.
He said it with the specific quality of someone who has already worked out the shape of the thing they're not saying — not confused about it, not undecided, butnot yet.Which implies a timeline. Which implies thatyetis a moving target and not an indefinite horizon. Which implies he's thought about what it would mean fornot yetto becomenowand has decided it isn't there.
That's different from: it will never be now. That's so different that I need to sit with the gap between them for a minute.
I'm also thinking about Dimitri Drakos.
Read it,he said.What do you actually know about how you ended up here?
What I know: Dante sold me to clear a debt. The debt was real — Emilia's life was the stake, and the only currency Dante had access to quickly enough was me, which tells me something about how this family organizes its resources that I've long since processed and put somewhere I don't look at often. The debt was real. The means by which the debt came due might not have been.
I've been sitting on this suspicion for weeks, building it from the pattern of what I know about the surveillance, the gap year, the specific clause in the contract that feels like it came from somewhere other than a standard Bratva acquisition framework.
He built the conditions. I've known this since October — that the debt was real but the timing of the call-in, the way it landed on Dante at exactly the moment where Emilia was the price of saying no — that wasn't coincidence. That was engineering.
What do you actually know about how you ended up here?
I know he chose me eighteen months before the contract. I know someone with surveillance capability assembled a file on me during a gap year I thought was private. I know that the person who asked for the gap year clause —he asked for it, apparently, Dante said, like it surprised him too — was the same person who assembled that file and could therefore have known exactly what I'd do with the time.
He watched me use a year he arranged for me to have.
And the person who did all of that is currently in a study asking me to let him have the silence because he isn't ready.
