We walked back to the house in a silence that was not uncomfortable – the silence of two women who had exchanged enough to build a foundation and knew that the foundation was not yet trust, but it was the shape trust would eventually take. The wind off the Clyde was cold and clean and it smelled of salt and diesel and the rain that was coming in from the west, and the house appeared around the final bend – Crag Manor, stone and slate and leaded windows, the smoke from the kitchen chimney rising in a thin grey column against the white sky.
Lachlan’s study. Late afternoon.
“Do you trust her?” he said.
He was standing behind his desk. I was sitting on the edge of it, which I had started doing in the months after the Wager because it closed the distance between us without either of us having to cross the room. His hand was on the desk beside mine. Our fingers were not touching. The gap was an inch.
“Not yet,” I said. “But I think she’s useful.”
He looked at me. The lamp was on. The fire was burning low. The room smelled of woodsmoke and cold stone and the leather of the books on the shelf behind him. His face in the lamplight was the face I had learned to read in increments – the face that gave nothing away to rooms full of people and gave everything to me in the quiet of the study at the end of the day.
“Useful is dangerous,” he said.
“So am I.”
His mouth moved. The smallest change. “Yes,” he said. “You are.”
The inch closed. His fingers covered mine on the desk. His hand was warm and his grip was measured – the grip of a man who held everything, always, with deliberate care.
“She says Mackie knew about the Ledger two years ago,” I said. “Called it a community register. Said it with admiration.”
Lachlan’s grip tightened by a fraction.
“That is not admiration,” he said. “That is reconnaissance.”
He pulled me off the desk. Pulled is the wrong word – he moved me, one hand on my waist, one on my hip, and the movement was efficient and certain and left me standing in front of him with his hands on me and his face close to mine and the lamplight making shadows of both of us on the study wall.
“Tell me what you need,” he said. The voice was quiet and the quietness was the part that made my breathing change.
I told him. He gave it. The exchange was the language we had built between us – the grammar of command and compliance that was only ours, that existed only in this room, that was both the opposite of the public partnership and the truest version of it. Afterwards, in the half-light, with my back against the bookshelves and his forehead against mine, I said: “Rona asked about Catriona.”
He pulled back slightly. “What did you tell her?”
“Enough. Not everything.”
“Good.”
That evening, a message arrived via Ewan’s network.
Ewan brought it to the study. He held the phone in his left hand and his face was doing the Fixer’s version of controlled alarm – the charm dialled down, the calculation visible.
“Mackie is hosting a fundraising dinner,” Ewan said. “At the Merchant Villas. Next week.”
“And?” Lachlan said.
“He has personally invited you.”
The study was silent. The fire cracked. The Clyde moved below the window. And in the silence, the three of us stood with an invitation that was also a summons, from a man who was drawing lines around everything we owned.
Lachlan looked at the phone. He looked at Ewan. He looked at me.
“Well,” he said. “That’s forward.”
CHAPTER 9
The Mackie Dinner
LACHLAN
