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“Define ‘the rest.’ Because from where I’m sitting, ‘the rest’ includes the part where she finds out you decided, on her behalf, what she was and wasn’t allowed to know about her own life. Women tend to have opinions about that.”
“I’m aware.”
“Are you? Because you don’t sound aware. You sound like a man who’s already decided this is the correct call and is simply waiting for the rest of us to catch up to it.” Darius’s voice had lost its edge of humor. “I’ve watched you make a hundred correct calls, Norden. This might be the first one that costs you the thing you’re trying to protect.”
“After,” Norden almost growled.
“The rest always comes after, with you. Eight hundred years of after.” Darius drained his glass, stood, and rolled his shoulders, settling back into his own skin like a man shaking off a conversation he’d rather not have started. “Fine. Your funeral. I’ll be around — skipping better parties for this — so at least let me watch.”
He crossed to the door, stopped, and looked back with none of the earlier lightness left in his face.
“For what it’s worth. I don’t think you’re wrong to protect her first. I think you’re going to pay for the order you did it in.” He raised his empty glass in a mock toast. “See you at the wreckage. I’ll bring better liquor next time. This occasion deserves it.”
He left the second glass full on the desk and didn’t look back.
Jen knocked twice, precise as a metronome, and didn’t wait for an answer before she entered the room. Victor had looped Elena’s team into the building-access portion of his diligence sweep, and Jen had drawn the assignment.
“Updated access schedule.” The folder hit the desk, corners squared without her seeming to think about it. “Devlin’s building hours, the installation timeline, the overnight rotation on the atrium. Two contractor deliveries flagged for escort clearance. I’ve also cross-checked the crew list against building access twice this week, since you mentioned wanting extra diligence.”
“Anything else.”
“That’s everything.” She turned before he’d finished nodding, tablet tucked against her side. “Let me know if you need it redone. I can turn it around in an hour, same as always.”
She stopped at the door, one beat before the hinge, and added it like an afterthought that wasn’t one. “Ms. Devlin seems to be settling in well. Elena mentioned it this morning.”
“Good.”
She was gone before the word finished landing, footsteps fading with the same competence she brought to everything — the kind that ran a building without the building ever noticing who was running it. Twelve years of that kind of invisible reliability, and Norden had never once had reason to think about her twice, which was, in its own way, the highest compliment the building had to offer.
He found a reason to be at the mezzanine rail by early afternoon, which took no effort, since half his reasons for existing lived three stories down running rigging tests on a panel that had apparently offended her.
She moved through the harness like heights told better truths than ground level ever managed — no hesitation, no wasted motion. She caught a line, hauled it taut, and told it what she thought of its attitude. He couldn’t hear the words. He didn’t need to. He knew the shape of a woman giving equipment one last chance before she started making decisions it wouldn’t survive.
Sleeves pushed past her wrists, one strap of her tool belt hanging loose. A burn scar along her left forearm, faded pale. A fresh scrape near the right elbow, shaped like a worktable met at speed. He noted every mark without meaning to. None of them had made her careful. All of them had made her exact.
His dragon watched her the way it watched fire — not afraid, never that, fixed on it in a way nothing in eight hundred years had managed to earn — centuries of watching men build empires and burn them down again, and none of it had ever looked like this — a woman three stories up, arguing with a piece of steel cable like it owed her money, unaware she’d rearranged the inside of a very old creature without trying, and would probably find the whole idea ridiculous if he ever worked up the nerve to say it out loud.
She tipped her head back to check the rigging angle against the glass ceiling, throat bared to the light, unaware of what that did to a man three stories up with no remaining excuse to still be standing here. He’d told himself ten minutes. He’d told himself twenty. He was well past the point of believing either number.
His phone rang against his hip. Singapore. He answered without looking away.
“Give me the number again.”
Silence on the line — brief, but real. Six years, and his GM had never once heard him ask for a repeat.
“Q3 came in at 11.4, sir. Up from projections.”
“Eleven point four.” He said it back like testing whether it would stick. Below him, Romily reset her stance, sunlight sliding across her face right up until his attention left the call behind completely. “Send the full breakdown to my assistant.”
He ended the call before the silence on the other end could finish becoming a theory about the state of his mind. Not an inaccurate theory, probably. He could already hear the version his GM would tell someone at the next executive retreat — the Q3 call where the boss made him repeat himself, the first time in years anyone had witnessed that malfunction.
Below, Romily won her argument with the cable. It cooperated on the second try. She patted it like it had earned the reward, and moved to the next line down without once looking up — without once knowing she had an audience who’d abandoned an international call to keep watching a woman argue with rigging equipment.
Norden didn’t leave the rail for another twenty minutes. He didn’t bother lying to himself about why.
Victor’s beehives lived on the roof-access landing, six boxes against the parapet, and Norden found him there past five with two coffees — one gone cold and still being drunk anyway.
The city ran out flat and gray beyond the parapet wall, indifferent the way it always looked from this height, and the air up here smelled like warm wax and rain that hadn’t decided yet whether it was coming.
