Chapter 3
Silas's POV:
The bar was Felix's choice, which meant it was loud in the particular way this city mistook for exclusive. Black stone, low amber light, a sound system tuned so that conversation became a private negotiation.
I had the corner of the counter to myself and the drink the bartender had invented for me two months ago — smoked orange peel, a bitters I had never asked the name of, because asking would have turned it into a conversation.
The room had noticed me before I finished sitting down. It always did. Twenty-four years of being stared at in rooms like this one had taught me the order of it: the height first, then the face, then the ring. I had stopped finding it interesting at about nineteen.
Two men in dark jackets moved to the edge of that notice and stayed there, one at each side of the space I was occupying. I did not look at them. I had stopped looking at them years ago, the way you stop looking at your own hands.
The woman had been working the room long before she came at me. I could tell she was good at it from the way she moved — the diagonal approach, the glass held at exactly the right height, the hair arranged so it would catch the light when she turned her head.
Late twenties, a dress that had cost more than the tab of the table she had left, and the fixed, happy determination of someone who had decided twenty minutes ago to be the one who got through.
I felt her before I saw her: the shift of weight, the smile arriving, the quick practiced assessment that came back delighted.
When she was four meters out, the guard on my left stepped into her path. "Good evening," he said, quiet and pleasant.
"Good evening." She leaned around him without any particular shame. "I'm not asking permission. I'm saying hello. Hello is free."
"Not tonight."
"Does he know you do his talking for him?" She had a laugh ready and she used it. A table near the window had gone quiet to watch. "One drink. He can scowl at me the entire time. I've had worse offers."
I drank. The ice knocked against my teeth. I let my eyes travel past her, settle on the door, and stay there.
"Ma'am."
"You could at least look at me." Her voice climbed. "I'm right here. I wore this whole dress for a reason."
"Ma'am."
"Fine." She stepped back and smoothed the dress down, and she did it well enough that it looked like her own idea. "Tell him he's wasted on himself."
Then she turned and went, and the room lost interest in her all at once, which was the cruelest thing it could have done. I ordered another drink and the bartender set it down without a word, and I was grateful for that.
I called Felix at ten past two and it rang four times before he picked up.
"Where are you?" he said.
"At the bar. Where you left me."
"Don't be dramatic." There was bass behind him and a woman laughing too close to the microphone. "I'm working."
"We're leaving."
"Leaving." He said it like a foreign word. "Jesus. It's not even half two."
"I'm going to count to ten. Then the car goes without you."
"Okay — okay, give me two minutes, I'm — hold on —" A muffled exchange I made no attempt to follow. Then he was back, bright and unbothered. "Two minutes. I'm getting her number, and then I'm entirely yours."
"Get it faster."
He laughed and hung up. I put the phone face down on the stone.
Four seconds later it lit, and because I had set that notification to something I could not ignore, I turned it over.
Camilla Sterling, at ten past two in the afternoon in New York, had written: "Fine. You won't have to be cold anymore. Starting today I'm not going to bother you again."
I read it twice. Something moved in my chest that I did not care for, so I picked up my glass and answered it with the appropriate amount of contempt.
"That's the first sensible thing you've said in a month. Keep it up. You can lose the contact too — I'm blocking this account."
The typing indicator came on, vanished, came on again. She was rewriting whatever she had planned, and I noticed myself waiting for it, which was the problem.
"You can't block me," she wrote. Then, three seconds later: "I love you too much."
"Love me. What exactly?"
"You. All of you," she wrote. "Your family's the obvious part — everyone knows the name, I'm not going to stand here and pretend I don't — but you got into INSEAD on your own, and you're running the overseas business while you're still in school, and you're gorgeous. So really there's no argument to be made."
I looked at that for a while. She had a way of writing that made flattery sound like a report she was filing on my behalf — tidy, sourced, impossible to argue with.
"You don't know any of that," I wrote. "You've known me a month."
"Long enough to have a very strong position," she said.
I looked at the screen and thought, with some satisfaction, that she was talking nonsense. She had never seen me. Not one photograph, not once, and she had asked — she had asked twice and I had ignored it twice. Gorgeous was a word she had made up and was now defending as though she had evidence.
The rest of it — the cleverness, the overseas business, the degree taken two time zones from the job — she had looked it up, and it still came back to the same thing in the end. The name. It always did. Everyone who came near me arrived for the name first and invented a reason to stay afterwards.
She was no different. She had just written it out more prettily than the others.
"You're ugly," I wrote, and put the phone down.
It showed as read inside a minute. Then nothing.
Ten minutes of nothing. I finished my drink, refused to look at the screen, looked at it twice anyway, and both times found the same two check marks under a message she had already seen.
