Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
"Jezebel."
“Jezebel Keyes. The president. Daughter of ex-Bratva. She built the firm on one principle: the men get what they want, the women get what they’re worth, and nobody talks about it outside the building.”
The light through the window hasn’t changed. The coffee shop hasn’t changed. But the room feels different. The air has weight now. My lungs are working harder than they should for a woman sitting in a chair doing nothing.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Blythe sets her cup down. Her eyes come to mine and they are hard and bright and measuring, the same assessing expression she gave me on my first day, and her voice when it comes is stripped of gentleness.
“Because when you started, I assumed you were playing the long game. The innocent act. The colour-coded files and the sensible shoes and the wide eyes. I figured you were smart enough to know what the firm was and savvy enough to pretend you didn’t, because the ones who play innocent get the biggest clients. The biggest clients mean the biggest payouts.”
My throat is closing. “You thought I was—”
“I thought you were reeling in the big fish. Anton Almazov. Biggest account Keyes has ever held. And there you were, with your yellow tabs and your timeline of key dates, and I thought: she’s good. She’s the best I’ve seen.”
The words are the same. The same assessment, the same conclusion, and hearing them from Blythe’s mouth is like being hit from a direction I didn’t know existed.
Blythe leans forward. Her voice drops.
“But I’ve been wrong before. And I’ve been near you for weeks, Daisy. I’ve seen you throw away his coffee. I’ve seen you try to get reassigned. I’ve seen you come back from that dinner white as paper and refuse to tell me why, and I’ve seen you flinch every time Kaye says his name, and I have been inside this firm for years and I know what a woman running a game looks like and you are not running a game.”
She pauses. Her hands are still around the cup. Mine are in my lap, gripping each other.
“You actually didn’t know.”
I can’t speak. My mouth opens and nothing comes out and I close it again and my hands are white and my face, I can feel my face, the colour leaving it in stages, throat first, then cheeks, then forehead, and the coffee shop tilts and I grip the edge of the table.
“Daisy.”
“Kaye,” I manage. One word. It’s all I can get out.
Blythe’s expression changes. Something crosses it that might be pity and might be anger and sits somewhere between both.
“Kaye told Anton you were willing. She told him you understood how things work at Keyes. She implied—no. She didn’t imply. She told him, in the corridor outside the conference room before your first meeting, that you were bright and eager and very willing to make his experience comfortable.”
Comfortable.
The word sits in the air between us and it rearranges everything.
The dinner. The proposition. The word arrangement on the white linen. The unsigned coffee and the car in the rain and the navy dress with no back and the knowing smiles at Ace Royale and the woman in red who told me he has good taste and the woman across the room who used to stand where I was standing. All of it. Every second of the past weeks rebuilds itself in my mind with a new foundation underneath it, and the foundation is this: Anton Almazov didn’t assume I was for sale. He was told I was. By my aunt. By the woman who braided my hair at Thanksgiving and sent me a first-day card with a lipstick kiss on the envelope and bought me a green dress and a navy dress and put me in his path like a gift-wrapped present and never, not once, not for one second, told me what I was being wrapped for.
“Excuse me,” I tell Blythe.
I make it to the bathroom. I lock the door. I kneel on the tile floor of a coffee shop bathroom a few blocks from Keyes, Inc. and I’m sick, thoroughly, completely, my body rejecting the last three weeks in the only language it has left, and when it’s over I sit back against the wall and press my hands against my eyes and I don’t cry because crying would require a kind of processing I haven’t reached yet.
I wash my face. I rinse my mouth. I go back out.
Blythe is still there. She hasn’t moved. Her espresso is untouched and mine is cold and she is sitting with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the door and when I sit down she reaches across the table and puts her hand on mine. Just that. Her hand on my hand, warm and firm and present, and it’s the first time Blythe has ever touched me.