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)
“Anton.” Her voice is professional. Her hands are not. They have moved from the keyboard to her lap. “It’s early. Can I help you with—”
“You told me she knew.”
The office goes still. Not silent, the building hums, the air conditioning drones, the harbour sends its distant wash through the windows, but still, the particular stillness of a room where someone has just understood that the conversation they’ve been dreading has arrived.
“You told me, in the corridor outside the conference room, that your niece was bright and eager and willing to make my experience comfortable. You told me she understood how things work at Keyes. You told me she was in on it.”
“Anton, I—”
“Did she know?”
Kaye’s mouth opens. Closes. Her hands in her lap grip each other, knuckles white, and I can see the calculation happening behind her eyes: what lie will work, what angle, what version of the truth can she offer that will protect her position and her career and her relationship with Jezebel and the architecture of deception she’s built around her own niece.
“Don’t,” I tell her. My voice is low and even and carries no warmth. “Don’t calculate. Don’t strategise. Don’t find an angle. I will know. I read people for a living, Kaye, and I’ve just come from the apartment of a young girl who told me the truth three times and I didn’t believe her, and the reason I didn’t believe her is sitting in this chair. So I am going to ask you once more. Did. She. Know.”
Kaye breaks.
Not dramatically. Not with tears or theatrics. She breaks the way structures break when the load-bearing wall gives: all at once, from the centre, the professional composure collapsing inward until what’s left is a woman in her fifties sitting behind a desk at six in the morning with her hands shaking and her glasses sliding down her nose and the truth falling out of her mouth in pieces she’s been holding together for years.
“She didn’t know.” A whisper. “Daisy didn’t know anything. She thought it was a real job. A real firm. I—I needed the client relationship. You’re the biggest retainer this firm has ever held. Jezebel was pressuring me to secure you personally and I didn’t have anyone available and Daisy was here, and she was young and pretty and I told myself she’d figure it out. I told myself she’d understand. I told myself she’d play along because that’s what everyone does, everyone plays along, and I didn’t—”
She stops. Her hands come to her face.
“You didn’t what.”
“I didn’t think you’d actually—” She can’t finish. She can’t say it. She can’t say: I didn’t think you’d fall for her, I didn’t think it would go past a dinner, I didn’t think my niece would end up in your bed believing you cared about her while you were running an experiment on her body.
I stand in her doorway and I let the silence do what my voice cannot.
“She didn’t figure it out,” I tell her. My voice cracks. The first crack, the first fracture in the composure I’ve been holding since I walked out of Daisy’s apartment. “She was exactly what she said she was. And I destroyed her because you lied.”
Kaye flinches. A full-body flinch, as if the words struck her physically, and I want to feel satisfaction and I feel nothing. Nothing except the memory of a girl who smiled at me in the aftermath, uncertain, hopeful, shy, and the smile was real and I missed it and there is no version of this confrontation that gives me that smile back.
I dismantle her.
Not with violence. I don’t touch her. I don’t raise my voice. I sit down across from her desk, the same chair Daisy sat in on her first day, and I explain to Kaye Fletcher in clinical, exacting detail what is going to happen to her career. The retainer is terminated. The referrals I’ve made to Keyes from other clients will be withdrawn by end of business. The professional connections she has cultivated through the Almazov name will receive calls this week from people she cannot afford to lose. None of this is illegal. None of this is violent. All of it is the methodical, systematic annihilation of a woman’s professional life by a man who has the resources to do it and the patience to make it thorough.
When I finish, Kaye is grey.
I stand. I button my jacket. I walk to the door.
“Anton.” Her voice behind me. Broken. “She’s my niece. I love her.”
I stop. I don’t turn around.
“Then you should have protected her from this place. Instead, you gifted her to it.”
I leave.
Her apartment is empty.
I drive there from Keyes. I take the stairs two at a time. I knock and there is no answer and I knock again and the door opens because it’s unlocked, still unlocked, the same unlocked door I walked through last night, and the apartment is dark and the bed is stripped and the bookshelf is half-empty and the cardigan is gone from the chair.