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“Then work faster.” He wasn’t shouting. He didn’t need to. The level certainty in his voice did more work than volume ever had. “I want daily updates, not weekly ones. I want to know if her coffee order changes. I want to know if a car idles too long on her block. I don’t care how small it seems. Nothing is too small right now. Nothing about this gets treated as routine.”

Victor didn’t argue. He’d worked for Norden long enough to recognize the difference between a request and a decision that had already been made, and this was unmistakably the second kind. He was gone within the minute, no wasted motion, no wasted words.

Darius watched the door shut, then looked back at Norden with none of the earlier humor left anywhere on his face. “You know what this means.”

“I know exactly what it means.”

“She doesn’t.”

“No.” Norden looked south, out past the glass, toward a studio that had no idea yet how much of his attention it had claimed — and intended to keep. “Not yet. Not until I’ve made sure there’s nothing left out there to be afraid of.”

Darius stood, quiet now, and stopped at the door before he said the thing he meant underneath the jokes. “Keep her safe.”

Norden didn’t answer right away. There wasn’t an answer that wouldn’t have said more than he had the appetite to say out loud, even to Darius, and they both understood the silence was the answer anyway.

Then he was gone, before Norden had to find an answer for that too.

The city spread out below the window, indifferent to all of it.

He picked up the object Darius had disturbed. He stood there a while longer than the task required, turning it once in his hand before he put it down.

Eight centuries of patience, and he’d never minded spending it on a cause worth the wait. He didn’t intend to start minding now.

SIX

ROMILY

Romily spread the full concept across the atrium floor at nine in the morning, which wasn’t remotely what Elena had meant by “please review the site parameters upstairs, in the conference room, like a normal contractor.”

The marble was cold enough through her jeans that she stopped noticing it after twenty minutes. Paper covered a good twelve feet of it, held down at the corners with the nearest heavy object she could find — a rolled tape measure, her travel mug, one of Elena’s own binders, borrowed without asking. Suspended panels ran the full height of the atrium in the drawings, angled to catch light at three different points across the day instead of sitting under it passively like everything else in this building did. Not decoration. Structure with opinions. The kind of thing a person had to stand inside to understand, which was the entire problem with trying to explain it from a conference room four floors up.

She’d charted the color shift twice more since Norden signed off on the concept — blues bleeding into amber as the panels caught the afternoon sun, cooling back toward silver by the time the lobby lights took over for the evening. Nobody had asked her to track the transitions hour by hour. She’d done it anyway, on the theory that if she was going to ruin this building’s beige personality, she might as well ruin it properly.

Elena arrived fast enough that she’d clearly heard about the floor situation before she’d even seen it.

“Ms. Devlin.” She stopped at the edge of the paper like it might be contagious. “This is the atrium floor.”

“It is.”

“Guests walk through here.”

“They’re walking around it fine.” Romily didn’t slow down, correcting an angle that had bothered her since two in the morning. “A conference room doesn’t have forty feet of ceiling. This does. I needed the ceiling.”

“There’s a protocol for⁠—”

“There’s a protocol for everything in this building. I’ve read most of them. None of them cover an artist needing to see her own work at actual scale, so I improvised.”

Elena’s eyes tracked down to the binder currently functioning as a paperweight, then back up to Romily’s face, silently building a case she wasn’t quite ready to file. “Is that mine?”

“It’s doing excellent work as a ballast right now.”

“I need that binder.”

“You’ll get it back the second the wind stops being a factor. Marble floor, forty-foot ceiling, occasional draft from the loading dock — physics doesn’t care whose binder it is, and, currently, neither do I.”

“There are paperweights. Actual paperweights. Designed for this exact purpose, sold in stores, purchasable with money.”

“None of them were within arm’s reach at seven a.m. Priorities. Your brand is beige.” Romily didn’t look up. “I’m fixing that. You’re welcome in advance.”