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She felt Leo's forehead against her collarbone, and she felt Leo's breath at her throat, and she felt, under the breath, the small unmistakable suggestion of Leo about to say something tender, which Vivienne was certainly not going to permit.

When she was a person again, she did what she had intended to do from the moment she had told Leo to shut the door.

She sat up.

She collected her cream silk. She pulled on her trousers. She ran a hand, once, through her hair, which had come out of its pin, and she left it down, because there was no one in this house tonight whose opinion of her hair mattered. She looked at Leo, who was still kneeling on the rug, shirt open, hair loose, hand flat on her own thigh. Leo was gorgeous. Very handsome. Leo was strong and a great fuck. Vivienne had enjoyed it.

Leo, looking up at her, said nothing.

Vivienne's breath was still uneven. Her knees were not entirely steady. Her body, which had just done the thing it had done on the rug, was not going to forgive her for standing up this soon. She stood up anyway, because the one thing she was not going to forgive herself for, not in this life, was letting Leo see her need a minute.

She walked to the door.

At the door she turned. Leo was on her knees on the rug in the firelight, and Vivienne, for one breath, allowed herself to look at her, because she was not going to look at her like this again.

"There is a mess," Vivienne said.

"Yes."

"Clean it up."

Leo's throat moved on a swallow.

"Yes, Madame."

Vivienne walked out.

In the corridor she did not run. She walked. She walked to her own bedroom at the pace of a woman who had won an argument she had not planned to have, and she closed her bedroom door behind her, and she stood for a moment with her hand on the wood of it, breathing, and she did not think about the woman kneeling in her living room, and she did not think about the wet mark on the hearth, and she did not think about the single low sound she had made, and she did not think about the way Leo had said I want you to come for me.

She did not think about any of those things.

She thought about all of them.

She went to her bed.

In the dark, under the linen, she lay on her back the way she had lain on the rug, with one difference, which was that her thigh, at the place Leo's hip had been, was still warm. She put her hand flat on her own sternum, where she had put it in the living room twenty minutes ago when her shirt had been cream silk and she had not yet broken. She was a woman who had just broken once in front of a stranger in her own house, and she was a woman who had walked out of that room on her own feet in the same hour, and neither of those facts cancelled the other. Vivienne Strauss, at fifty-two, on her back in the dark, permitted herself two minutes of honesty.

Two minutes of honesty: she had liked it. She had liked the rug. She had liked Leo's jaw and Leo's fingers inside her fucking her and the way Leo had said I want you to come for me. She had liked that Leo had not pretended, at any point, to be more gentle than she was. She had liked that Leo had not asked permission for the single thing Leo had not been told Vivienne liked and had, apparently, guessed correctly. She had liked, most of all, that Leo had not yet, in the ten minutes since, knocked on her door. She did not want Leo at her door. She wanted Leo to be the sort of woman who would know not to come to her door.

Two minutes were up.

She took her hand off her sternum and put it on the linen and closed her eyes, and she did not sleep, and she did not go to Leo, and she did not cry, and she did not think of Lara Kossek, and she permitted herself exactly one smile, half a breath long, in the dark, and no one saw it, and that was as much as Vivienne Strauss was going to allow herself tonight.

10

Blackthorn HQ at eight in the morning was quieter than the residence had been at five.

Leo went up in the elevator with coffee she had not tasted and a shirt she had buttoned in the lodge bathroom at six, because her own shirt from the night before had lost its buttons in a living room situation she was not, this morning, thinking about. She walked into the room on the third floor and found Avery already there with two screens lit and one wall screen cycling through a flowchart of names, and Avery did not turn around.

"You are late."

"I am not."

"You are seventeen minutes later than you said you would be."

"Traffic."

"There is no traffic between the sixteenth and the eighth at six-thirty and you know it."