Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE
I expect the other shoe to drop, but it doesn’t.
I don’t want to leave the office that first day, certain that when I return I’ll be locked out and persona non grata in the place I built, but that doesn’t happen.
I get in early the next day—a bit psychotically early, I will admit—and everything is as it should be.
I make it in so early that I beat Tess in and that’s a good thing, because I don’t have to run the gauntlet of her innuendos or speculation.
I don’t think I can control my facial expressions. Not yet.
I see that Luc is not in his office—and I am deeply ashamed of myself for thinking of him by that name, but I can’t seem to help it—so I duck into mine instead.
I have always liked it. It sits along the hall on the way to the big office, and I’ve always liked to think of it as the power behind the throne.
I happen to be both the power and the throne, but no one knows it but me.
So why not sit in a little internal office that has no windows of its own, but commands every window in this place?
I’ve always liked being underestimated. I learned that in my stepmother’s house, too.
And that first day after the appearance of Luc, I’m grateful for the fact that I can sit with my back to a wall, my door closed, and will therefore see anyone coming. That there will be no sneaking up on me in my delightful cave of an office.
I spent all last night digging around online, looking for clues to this man’s identity, but I came up with nothing.
This man showed up in the most sacred place I have, my beautiful office that runs precisely the way I want it to, where I am never questioned or demeaned or attacked by anyone. He clearly studied me without my knowing it, and this makes me feel even more exposed.
I feel like the kid I haven’t been in years, trapped in a house I hated with a family that—it was made abundantly clear—wasn’t mine.
If I didn’t stay out of the way, I paid for it.
Sometimes I paid for it even when I did stay scarce.
My stepmother’s goal was to get rid of me and she accomplished it.
Will the fake Luc Garnier do the same thing to me now?
The very idea makes my entire body ache. Like a vicious bout of a sudden flu—the kind that can kill a person if they’re not careful.
This man did all these things already to place himself in the middle of this life I built, he is doing them even now, and I can’t find anything on him, anywhere.
It makes me feel even smaller and more precarious.
This morning I decide instead to switch my focus to the upcoming masked ball in Cap Ferrat. I put in a long morning of digging, trying to figure out the highly exclusive and not at all public guest list.
Because once I have it, I can try to cross-reference the sort of people who would want entry to a place like that—enough to, say, pose as a fictional character—and what they might do there if they got it.
It’s slow going. Absurdly wealthy people can afford privacy and the security to go with it.
I look up at the knock on my door and call out a quick, “Come in,” assuming it’s Tess finally coming to see what’s become of me today.
I have to school my expression when Luc appears there instead, filling up the whole of the doorframe in a way that instantly reminds me—so much so that my stomach seems to drop—of how big he is.
Enormous and yet elegant. It’s a dizzying combination.
But I swore to myself that I was not going to let him get to me today.
“It’s an unusual name,” he says, nodding at the name on the door. “Annagret Alden.”
“It is only unusual in some cultures,” I correct him. “In others, it is very common.”
I focus in on him and notice that he is wearing a completely different suit from the day before. Yet it achieves, in all its particulars, the same level of perfection as the one I already saw.
This solidifies some things for me. A person might be able to find, purchase, and inhabit one such suit but two? That feels like a lifestyle. A style to which one has long since become accustomed, even. I make a note.
And then I continue. “The story I have been told that my mother was of royal Danish blood, though a great many generations removed. That was what my father always said when I was small and asked about her.” I can see the next question in his gaze, and forestall it.
“I personally cannot remember her. She died when I was only a few months old and there are no pictures of her anywhere in my father’s home, because my stepmother objected.
But as he is a small, brown-haired man, I have always assumed that the story was true. ”
I wave a hand in my own direction, encompassing all six feet of me sitting there behind my desk. Complete with the blue eyes and blond hair that mean I resemble nothing so much as a shield maiden. Or a Valkyrie.
The latter of which is where I got the logo for Miravakia Investigations.
“As you can see,” I say, “I look as if I ought to be at the helm of a Viking ship in a terrible storm, cleaving my way through the North Sea. Instead, I’m afraid my origins are rather more ordinary.
I grew up in the unremarkable suburbs of a midsize city in Pennsylvania, nowhere near any ocean of any kind, and the closest thing I ever did to going Viking was to take the train to New York City on my eighteenth birthday. I’ve been here ever since.”
I sit back in my seat and look at him, standing there so deceptively casually in my doorway. “What about you?”
He smiles at that and I almost think it looks genuine.
“No one has ever confused me for a Viking,” he says.
We both know he’s avoiding personal questions, but I have to like—again, against my will—how easily he does it. As if we are both involved, now, in some grand joke. Just the two of us and this secret of ours.
“I was up most of the night thinking about all of this,” I say.
“Oh, dear,” he murmurs, his voice a dark knowing.
There’s a golden sort of gleam in his gaze, and nothing like an apology on his face as he moves into my office, making me suddenly and irrevocably aware of how small it is.
Almost claustrophobic, really. Maybe it’s simply that his shoulders seem to take over the space, even when I can see that they don’t. They don’t actually brush the walls.
Still, it feels that way as he comes and sits in one of the chairs on the other side of my desk, where the clients normally perch themselves. And in so doing, he somehow makes it seem as if I’m the one begging for an audience with him.
And that dark knowing is in his gaze now, too. “Did I keep you awake at night, Annagret?”
I feel the heat of that and I don’t want to. I resent it.
I tell myself that I resent it deeply as it winds its way inside me, but that is not the point of this. It doesn’t matter what I feel. It can’t.
It can only matter what I do.
“You must be here for a reason,” I say, and though it’s a struggle to keep my voice light, I manage it. “Given that this is a private investigation firm, I have to assume that the reason is that you’re looking for something. Or someone. Why don’t we look for answers together?”
“What a generous offer.” His tone is sardonic.
“Not at all.” I make sure my smile is pointed. “It’s entirely selfish. I want you gone. It seems to me that solving whatever mystery it is you’re here to solve will get you on your way sooner rather than later.”
He looks as if he wants to laugh at that, but he doesn’t.
He sits back in that chair that is nearly too small for him.
The chair that I suddenly realize he could easily smash with a fist, if he wished.
I study him with more intensity, trying to understand how a man who can look elegant enough that he could grace the cover of an Italian fashion magazine with ease can also seem as if he is only just keeping the true power inside of him under control.
I’m fascinated.
And I’m aware of an alarm that rings at that fascination, deep and long within me, but I ignore it.
Luc is not exactly leaning into the hand he has propped up on the arm of the chair, but he taps his index finger against the side of his face as he regards me. As if contemplating his next move in a chess match.
“I’m looking for a woman,” he tells me after a moment or two pass us by.
And there is a terrible clarity in the disappointment that runs through me at that.
A terrible, revealing clarity and one I could do without—because it tells me far too much about the various sensations I feel in this man’s presence. Sensations I’ve been calling by other names because I don’t want to admit what they really are.
When surely I ought to know better. I do know better.
I’m disgusted with myself, but all I do is sit forward and flip open my notebook as if this is any client intake meeting. “I’m listening,” I say.
I can feel his gaze on the side of my face, as if I’ve thrown open one of the windows I don’t have in this room to let the summer sun in. “If she exists, this woman might have emigrated here from somewhere in Europe. That would have been some thirty-five years ago. Give or take.”
I put down my pen. “You do realize that you’ve described a vast number of people.”
“I do indeed realize that.”
“Do you have any other details?” I look up at him. “Any actual details, that is?”
“She was known by the name Mariana,” he says, as if it costs him something to say that. I remind myself this could be an act, even though, somehow, I don’t think it is. “But, of course, I cannot say if she kept that name. Or ever used it.”
“Of course.” I sit back and look at him. “Surely a man of your means has other ways to go about finding this sort of information.”
His eyebrows rise into an expression of such sheer arrogance that I am once again certain that I’m right about him. That this is no con man in the classic sense. This man has never known a moment of life that does not pay homage to his great consequence. I can feel this in my bones.