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)
It’s the tapping. It’s the rhythm of a man who is cataloguing.
I push back.
“Is there anything else you need regarding the case, Mr. Almazov?”
The tapping stops.
His eyes hold mine. A stretch of white table between us and the silence fills every inch of it, and Kaye is pulling out her phone to discuss scheduling, but his focus hasn’t moved, and mine hasn’t either, and there is a tiny, reckless part of me that is proud of those words and a larger, smarter part that wishes I hadn’t.
He smiles. Full, this time. Both sides.
“Not yet.”
THE BREAK ROOM AT KEYES, Inc. has a coffee machine that costs more than my car, and I’m standing in front of it pressing buttons I don’t understand when Blythe appears.
“Third button. Then the second one twice.”
I press. Coffee happens. It’s better than anything I’ve ever made in my life and I drink it too fast and burn my tongue.
Blythe leans against the counter. She’s holding her own coffee like she’s been holding it for a while, waiting, which I try not to think about.
“How was the meeting?”
“Fine.” I burn my tongue again. “Professional. Kaye was there the whole time.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I set my coffee down. “It was a meeting. We discussed the account. He reviewed the file.”
“Did he.”
I stop. Because the truth is he didn’t. He barely turned three pages. He spent nearly an hour asking me about Idaho and mystery novels and whether I cook, and I told him things I haven’t told anyone in Monaco, and his eyes never left mine, and when he said not yet I felt it in the backs of my knees.
“He reviewed the file,” I repeat.
Blythe’s mouth pulls to one side. “He likes you.”
The words hit the air between us and just sit there.
“He’s a client.”
Her expression closes, a door easing shut. She picks up her coffee. Takes a sip. Holds my eyes over the rim and gives me nothing, and that nothing is so full of what she’s choosing not to say that it fills the break room.
“Yes,” she agrees. “He is.”
She leaves. The coffee machine hisses behind me, cycling through its cleaning program, and I stand there with my burned tongue and my too-fast heart and the ghost of his voice saying not yet like a man who has already decided how this ends.
ANTON
The car pulls away from Keyes, Inc. and Monaco spills past the window in its usual performance of blue and white and money, and I’m thinking about a girl from Idaho who colour-tabs files in quarter-inch intervals and knows the exact mileage between Boise and the Côte d’Azur.
Five thousand miles. She calculated it on the plane.
I loosen my tie. The car is cool, tinted, the leather carrying some scent the service applies to suggest old wealth, and I pull the knot free and let the fabric hang and I think about the yellow tab.
She added a category. A young paralegal from Boise State, newly into a job she got through her aunt, and she flagged a billing discrepancy that three senior associates missed or chose to ignore. She flagged it because it “didn’t fit the overall picture.” She flagged it because it was wrong and she couldn’t bring herself to pretend it wasn’t.
Or because she wanted me to see it.
Kaye’s words from last week are in my ear. The corridor outside conference room three, Kaye with her hand on my arm and her voice dropped to that register. My niece is very bright, Mr. Almazov. Very eager to learn. She understands how things work here, and she’s very willing to make your experience with the firm... comfortable.
I didn’t ask what comfortable meant. I didn’t need to. Keyes, Inc. is a firm where comfortable has only ever meant one thing, and every woman I’ve encountered here has confirmed it: the associates who lean too close, the paralegals who leave doors ajar, the partners who schedule “client dinners” that don’t appear on any calendar.
And now there’s Daisy Fletcher. Blue eyes, sensible shoes, a file tabbed with the exactness of a girl who believes the world runs on rules. A girl who flinched when her aunt corrected her and folded her hands in her lap and turned pink from the throat up, and none of it, not one second of it, read like a woman who knows the score.
Which is the point, isn’t it. That’s what makes her exceptional.
I’ve met women at firms like Keyes in Saint Petersburg, in London, in every city where the underworld needs legal cover and the legal cover needs bodies. The ones who play innocent are the most dangerous. They let you believe you’re the one choosing, the one pursuing. They let you run the meeting and ask the personal questions and lean back in your chair and think you’re in control, and by the time you realise the architecture was theirs all along, you’re already inside it.