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“There it is. The setting.” She points the cup at me. “You turn the charm on like a faucet, and you think I can’t see your hand on the tap. I’ve spent my whole life watching men turn taps. The difference is most of them are hiding an empty account behind it, and you’re hiding a full one, which is worse, because a full one I can’t dismiss.”

“You’ve thought a great deal about my big, fat account.”

“I’ve thought a great deal about every account in this building; it’s my job. Don’t flatter yourself into the list.” She tears a piece of bread off the board and points it at me instead, an upgrade in weaponry. The flush climbing her throat undercuts the whole performance, and she knows it’s there; she talks faster to outrun it. “And quit looking pleased. You get this face when I say something true, like I’ve handed you a gift. It’s unnerving. Men are supposed to flinch when I’m right, but you’re enjoying it.”

“I told you at the bar that I’d rather be handed the thing I missed than be comfortable.” I drink. “You keep handing it to me. I keep being grateful. I don’t see the problem you’re describing.”

“The problem I’m describing is that I came in here braced for you to make last night nothing, to hand me some cool little speech about keeping it professional, and instead you’re being decent about it, and decent from you is more destabilizing than cold would’ve been, and you know that, which is why you picked it.” She chews, swallows, and the heat creeps up her throat as the next thing arrives before her filter can stop it. “Also, you left a mark on my neck, and I had to find it in the bathroom mirror like a teenager, so spare me the gentleman act; you were not a gentleman last night.”

“Left side. I know exactly where it is.” I hold her eyes, and the color climbs higher, and she scowls to bury it. “I put it there on purpose. I won’t be apologizing for accurate work.”

“You’re too old to preen over a hickey.” She drags the back of her hand across the corner of her mouth, the tell she doesn’t know she has, the one she ran all night when her brain got ahead of her tongue. “We’re going to be normal about this. I’ve decided. I’m a professional, you’re a deranged Greek crime lord with a coffee fetish, and we’re going to be completely normal.”

“You forgot to mention my big, fat cock, the one you’ve enjoyed twice now.” The blush climbs higher, and I let myself enjoy it. “You’re doing wonderfully at normal.”

“I hate you before nine. Write it down.”

“Eat first. You go feral on an empty stomach and full of caffeine, and I’ve a long enough day without you vibrating through the walls.” I set the cup down. “I’m going into the bank this morning. See how the business breathes without me over its shoulder.”

She finishes the bread. “Go pat your legitimate money while I look for clues on how to save your ass.”

“Much obliged. It’s a fine ass.”

“I’ve seen better.” She’s grinning now, having lost the fight to hold it.

“Somehow, I doubt that,” I say with a wink.

My phone lights up on the counter with a name. I closed a deal across the night I shared a bathroom encounter with Elena in Lux, and I take it, because Petros doesn’t call to make conversation.

“Kallistratos,” I answer.

“Adrianos, sir.” Quick, pitched lower than he ran at Lux, the salesman scrubbed out of his voice. “I’ve got something. The kind of something a man doesn’t say on a phone. Money moving in patterns that sit right on top of the hits against the Crown, the framing, the whole bloody business. I think it touches what everyone’s been bleeding for.”

“Go on.”

“Not on a line. Face to face, somewhere with people, daylight on it.” A breath. “I’ll be honest with you, I think I’ve picked up a tail. Two days now, same sedan twice, a face that keeps turning up where I am.” Then a laugh, short, abashed at himself. “Listen to me. It’s probably nothing. I close one clean deal with the great Kallistratos, and overnight I’m a man in a thriller, flinching at my own driver. Paranoia. This life breeds it. We all get there.”

“Pick the place. Open, busy, daylight like you said.” I keep my voice level, because the thing he’s laughing off is the thing that happens on a daily basis in my line of business. “I’ll come to you. Today.”

He gives me the name of the restaurant, and I repeat it back to him to confirm.

“I’ll see you there in an hour,” he says, ending the call.

I set the phone down and turn. Elena’s not at the breadboard anymore. She’s two feet off my elbow with the coffee held to her chest and her eyes already lit with the thing that put a cocked hammer against her skull on her first day under my roof.

“Money in patterns that sit on top of the hits,” she says. I can hear the case assembling under it, the sentences stretching longer the closer she gets to the conclusion I haven’t agreed to. “He’s got primary information and he’s scared enough to want witnesses around him, which means it’s solid, and if it’s solid then I have to be in that room when he opens his mouth, because you’ll hear a frightened man telling a story and I’ll hear what his money’s been doing while he tells it, and those are two different instruments, and you hired me for the second one, you hired me for the gap between what a man says and what his accounts confess, so don’t stand there and tell me the one meeting where both halves matter is the one I sit out.”

“No.”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

I lift the cup, drink, set it down between us on the marble I spent all morning keeping wide. “You’re not coming.”

12

Elena

Nobody decides for me what I do with my own legs, which is a position I’ve held since I was four, and one the King of the Greek Elliniki is about to lose from clear across the borough.