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She circled it once, checking from three angles, half-expecting the effect to be her own tired eyes playing tricks. It wasn’t. The warmth held steady no matter where she stood.

“Show-off,” she told it, and meant it as a genuine compliment.

She pulled out her phone to photograph it, on the theory that Jessa would never believe this without evidence, and the camera flattened the whole effect into an ordinary panel with decent lighting, nothing more. She tried three more angles. Same result. Some things, apparently, refused to be captured secondhand — you had to stand in the room and let it happen to you directly, which struck her as a deeply inconvenient quality for a piece of art to have and also, if she was honest, the exact reason she loved this kind of work in the first place.

She’d made pieces like this maybe four times in six years when the glass and the heat history and her own hands and the available light all cooperated at the exact same moment without being asked twice. She didn’t know why tonight had been the night. She didn’t examine it too hard. Some things you didn’t interrogate, the way you didn’t ask a gift horse for its dental records. You stood in an empty atrium at nine p.m., alone, grinning at a piece of glass like an idiot, and called it enough.

It glowed there in the dark, warm and pleased with itself, and she had no way of knowing that the reason it had never looked like this in her own studio had everything to do with which building she’d happened to be standing in when she made it.

Elena found her the next morning exactly where she wasn’t supposed to be — three floors down, in a service office that smelled like coffee and old blueprints, reviewing structural load drawings with the hotel’s contracted engineer, a soft-spoken man named Adebayo she’d called directly the previous afternoon without mentioning it to anyone.

Elena didn’t knock. She arrived the way a woman arrives when she’s already composed her opening line in the elevator and refuses to let the moment go to waste, tablet clutched to her chest like a shield.

“You didn’t clear this through operations.”

“I cleared it through Adebayo. He is operations.”

Adebayo, wisely, said nothing, and studied a spreadsheet like it had personally requested his full attention.

“That’s not how the approval chain works.”

“It’s exactly how the approval chain works. I needed load numbers from the man who calculates loads. I called him. He said yes.” Romily rolled up the drawing, tucked it under one arm, and gave Adebayo a nod he returned with the relief of someone who’d survived an entire meeting without once justifying his own existence. “Sit in on the next one if it helps you sleep.”

“It would help a great deal, actually.”

“Adebayo also thinks the northeast bracket needs reinforcing before we hang anything heavy on it. That’s not me going around you. That’s me getting the answer before the question turns into a costly delay.”

“How costly.”

“The kind that involves a contractor’s lawyer and a very unhappy design team. I’m trying to save you the phone call.” Romily tapped the rolled drawing against her palm, already three problems ahead. “You can thank me later. Or now. I accept thanks in either tense.”

Elena’s expression didn’t soften, exactly, but it stopped fighting her. “Fine. Tell me next time. Before, not after.”

“No promises. I’ll aim for during.” Romily was on her way out. “Results tomorrow. Wear comfortable shoes.”

“Why would I need comfortable shoes?”

“You’ll see.”

She was gone before Elena could turn that into a follow-up question — which had become, in the space of one week, closer to a professional habit than either of them would admit out loud.

Behind her, she heard Adebayo ask, in the careful tone of someone who valued his continued employment, whether this happened often.

Elena’s answer didn’t carry. Romily didn’t need it to. She already knew what it was.

SEVEN

NORDEN

Victor didn’t sit down. He crossed the office at a clip that already had teeth in it, tablet lit, and dropped it on the desk hard enough that the sound alone counted as the first sentence of the whole report.

“The surveillance has a name. Lucien Tarek.”

“Say that like I’m already supposed to know it.”

“You should. Rival hotel group, three properties, aggressive expansion two years running. Everyone in the industry knows him as a competitor with sharp elbows and a talent for hostile buyouts.” Victor swiped the screen, timeline unfurling, dense enough with dates that it had clearly cost someone a very long night. “What nobody outside a very small circle knows is that he’s a dragon. Unregistered with any claw. Operates alone, which in dragon terms tends to mean one of two things — either he’s stronger than every claw that ever tried to keep him, or he burned every bridge that would’ve had him.”

“Which is it?”