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"You said that yesterday."

"I'm saying it again. With more information."

Avery, very dry: "Copy."

Leo permitted herself one exhale, and only one. Then she went back in to meet the staff.

Behind her, in the library, on the far side of doors she had pulled closed behind her, a woman took a second small sip of coffee alone, and the day began.

5

The first morning with a bodyguard was an experiment in how much of her life Vivienne was willing to leave unsaid.

Leo Cole arrived at the residence at six-fifty. Vivienne knew the time because her phone pinged with the Blackthorn arrival notification and because, without looking at her phone, she had heard the small shift in the house: a stair creak that was not Guérin's, Beaumont's voice in the lodge speaking to a second person in a tone Vivienne did not use in her own home, and then nothing. Leo did not announce herself in the corridors. She moved as if she had been in this house for a year.

Vivienne came down at seven in grey flannel, cashmere turtleneck, her hair up. Leo was at the bottom of the stairs with her hands by her sides, and the jeans and boots of yesterday were gone. Dark trousers today, plain dark shirt, a charcoal jacket cut to conceal the weapon Vivienne had agreed yesterday not to ask about. Her hair was pulled back. She looked, Vivienne admitted only to herself, like someone who intended to be useful.

"Madame."

"Mademoiselle Cole."

"Your car is cleared. Your route is cleared. Driver is Blackthorn-vetted, not your usual man."

"Where is my usual man."

"Reassigned for the week. He is fine. He is paid."

"Mm."

Leo held the door. Vivienne did not thank her for it. Vivienne had not thanked anyone for holding a door in thirty years, and she was not going to begin this morning. Leo did not appear to want to be thanked, which Vivienne found, against expectation, a relief.

In the car, Leo sat in the front passenger seat. Vivienne, in the back, spent the first three minutes of the ride pretending she was alone. The pretense failed somewhere around the river. In the front seat, Leo's head was turned to the road, the line of her broad shoulder in the charcoal jacket still. Leo studied the road with an attention Beaumont had never once given it. Vivienne found it easier to dislike Leo than to find the dislike convincing, and she let it go.

"What time is the first meeting," Leo asked.

"Seven-forty."

"Who is in it."

"My operating committee for Southern Europe."

"Names."

She gave them. Leo did not write them down. Leo did not need to, which was either irritating or reassuring, and Vivienne had not yet decided which.

At the office, Leo cleared the lobby before Vivienne crossed it. She cleared the elevator. She cleared the executive floor, which took forty-five seconds and struck Vivienne's chief of staff as impertinent, which Vivienne elected not to correct.

By seven-forty she was at the head of the glass table, and Leo was in the corner of the conference room in a chair positioned to give her sightlines to the door, the window, and the people, and which she sat in without any suggestion that she intended to apologize for occupying it.

Vivienne ran the meeting. She did not permit Leo's presence to alter the rhythm of the meeting in any way the committee could remark on. She ran pricing. She ran margin. She ran an acquisition memo that was suddenly, quietly, of acute interest to the five people in the room who had not leaked pricing to Vinciguerra and who were currently trying to work out which of the other three had. None of that showed. They were a good committee. They had been trained by her.

Ninety minutes in, a small shift in the room caught Vivienne's eye without quite asking for her attention. Leo, in the corner, had angled her head a fraction toward her earpiece. Her hand had moved once to the phone in her lap, and Vivienne, at the head of the table, without turning, watched in her peripheral vision as Leo read the screen. Leo's face did not change. Leo's strong jaw, which Vivienne had begun, without wanting to, to read, did change.

Then Leo stood up.

Vivienne, mid-sentence, did not stop speaking. She continued the sentence, which was a sentence about depreciation, because stopping mid-sentence would have been the concession Leo was clearly inviting her not to make. She finished the sentence.

Then she said, "Yes, Mademoiselle Cole."