“Nonnegotiable,” I confirm.
She nods once. The meeting continues. Two hours later, I walk back upstairs.
Amy looks up from her notebook when I slide into the chair across from her. She reads my face the way she reads everything, completely, without missing anything.
“Well,” she says.
I pick up her water glass and drink from it.
She is quiet for a moment. “Are they good people?”
I think about Caterina’s question and Domenico’s face and the eight people around the table who did not flinch when I told them what I would and would not tolerate.
“They are people,” I say, “with the full complexity that entails. But they heard me. And they agreed. That is the beginning of something workable.”
She reaches across the table and takes my hand. “Okay,” she says.
We stay at the table for a while in the ordinary noise of the restaurant above a room that does not appear on any record, and I think about what it means to have a name. A real one. The kind that has weight and history and three generations of decisions attached to it.
Saint Devereux, heir to the Deveraux empire and a part of the Crowned Families. A world organization that funds governments. Ultimate power and control. They know exactly who I was the moment I walked in. They know my influence. The sons of Kenyan and their families aren’t to be touched. It’s all they agreed to, but they also agreed that we have to watch them.The Order is not to be trusted. They cannot be wiped out except for one.
Saint
The tracker conversation happens on a Wednesday.
We are in the kitchen, her at the table with her coffee, me at the counter with mine and briefing documents, which have become thicker since the council meeting and show no signs of thinning.
She sets down her coffee and looks at me. “The tracker,” she says.
I set down my documents.
“My student ID,” she says. “You had Zero embed a tracker without telling me.”
“Yes.”
“When did you remove it?” she asks.
“I haven’t,” I say, truthfully. “It’s for your safety.”
She will always be a target. Her safety is my priority. She doesn’t understand the magnitude of who she is with, but she will in due time.
“Because that morning, you left knowing that I was in your dorm room with you, and you chose to trust that anyway. Tracking someone who chooses to trust you is not about control or about caging you. It is exactly the thing I told myself I was not doing.”
She holds my gaze. “You should have told me.”
“Yes.”
“Before you put it there,” she says. “Not just why.”
“You’re right,” I say, “to both.”
“If Victor wasn’t a threat, would you have told me then?”
I think about this honestly.
“Eventually. When I was sure you could have the information without it changing how safe you were willing to let yourself feel.”
“That is still not the same as telling me first,” she points out.
