Chapter 2
DAISY
I’ve colour-tabbed the file three times.
Red for litigation. Blue for compliance.
Green for correspondence. Yellow for the two clauses in the retainer agreement that don’t match the billing code but that Blythe told me to stop asking about.
I’ve squared the spine, aligned the tabs so they cascade down the right edge in exact quarter-inch intervals, and clipped a summary sheet to the inside cover with the client name, account number, and a timeline of key dates that nobody asked me to prepare but that felt necessary.
The file is immaculate. I am not.
Conference room three has glass walls. I can see Kaye at the far end of the corridor, walking toward me with a coffee in one hand and a smile that says this is the beginning of everything I brought you here for, and behind her, through two more panes of glass and the width of the lobby, Anton Almazov is signing in at reception, and even from this distance I can tell that his suit today is charcoal, not black, and his tie is a deep, burnt blue, and I shouldn’t know these things already but I do.
I’ve been in this conference room a while.
The table is long, white, polished to a shine that reflects the overhead lights in two strips.
I’m in the chair closest to the door because it felt presumptuous to sit at the centre, and because if I need to leave, the exit is within reach.
I don’t know why I’m calculating exits. I’m a paralegal in a conference room with a colour-tabbed file.
This is what I trained for. This is why Kaye brought me to Monaco.
The door opens.
Kaye comes in first. “Daisy, you remember Mr. Almazov.”
He’s behind her. He fills the doorframe like a man in a foreign film I used to rent from the Boise public library, and the comparison is so absurd that a tiny, hysterical part of my brain tries to laugh and the rest of my brain shuts it down with force.
“Miss Fletcher.”
His voice. I wasn’t prepared for his voice.
On Friday he didn’t speak to me, not directly, and I’d built a version of it in my head over the weekend that was deep and clipped and European and impersonal.
The real version is warm. Lower than I expected.
There’s an accent that isn’t French and isn’t quite Russian, and it sits on the consonants like candlelight on the edge of a glass.
“Mr. Almazov.” I stand. Extend my hand. His grip is dry and brief and I let go first, which I’m proud of, and then I ruin it by gesturing at the file like a flight attendant pointing out the emergency exits.
“I’ve prepared the account summary. The retainer agreement, all current correspondence, and a timeline of key dates are tabbed and cross-referenced. ”
He pulls out the chair across from mine. Not the one at the head of the table, where clients sit. The one directly across from me, so that when he sits and leans back, we are separated by a stretch of polished white surface and nothing else.
Kaye takes the head. “Daisy has been exceptionally thorough,” she tells him. “Top of her class at Boise State. We’re lucky to have her.”
“Boise.” He picks up the file. His fingers find the first tab, the red one, and he opens to the page and his eyes move across the text before they lift to me. “Idaho.”
“Yes.”
“A long way from Monaco.”
“About five thousand miles.” The number comes out before I can stop it. I calculated it on the plane. I don’t know why I’m sharing this.
His mouth does something. Not a smile. The corner lifts, holds, and his eyes stay on mine, and the lift tells me he is either charmed or entertained and I can’t tell which and I’m not sure it matters because either way my face is getting hot.
“Five thousand miles,” he repeats. “And how are you finding the other end?”
“The coffee’s better here.”
Kaye laughs. Anton doesn’t. His eyes don’t leave mine.
He turns a page of the file without breaking contact, and the gesture should be rude, dismissive, except that his fingers brush the yellow tab on the retainer clause, the one I added, the one Blythe told me to file blue and forget, and he pauses.
“You added a category.”
My pulse picks up. “Yellow. For items that don’t fit the standard coding but seem relevant.”
“Relevant to what?”
“To the overall picture. The billing structure has a discrepancy between the service description and the—”
“Daisy.” Kaye’s voice is smooth. Warm. A hand on the wheel. “Mr. Almazov is here to discuss the new account scope. Let’s stay on track.”
I close my mouth. The heat in my face changes flavour, from flustered to something closer to shame, and I sit back in my chair and fold my hands in my lap and I’m young and I just tried to flag a billing discrepancy to a client and got shut down by my own aunt, and I want to dissolve into the polished white table.
Anton closes the file. He doesn’t mention the yellow tab again. But his thumb rests on it for a beat too long before he sets the file aside, and when he sets it aside, he does it gently, and I don’t know what to do with that.
“So, Miss Fletcher.” He leans back. His jacket falls open, one button undone, and his hands settle on the armrests with the ease of a man who has sat in every conference room and owned most of them. “Tell me about yourself.”
I blink. “I—pardon?”
“Yourself. Where you grew up. How you ended up here. Whether you like Monaco.” His head tilts. “Personal questions.”
“I’m not sure that’s relevant to the account scope,” I manage, and from the head of the table Kaye makes a sound that might be a cough.
His eyes change. Not the colour. The temperature. The grey warms by a single degree, and the half-smile returns, and I have the wild, ungrounded thought that I just passed a test I didn’t know I was taking.
“Humour me.”
I glance at Kaye. She nods, small and encouraging.
So I talk. I tell him about Idaho, about the house with the porch that needs repainting, about my parents who think Monaco is near Milan and sent me a guidebook to the wrong country.
I tell him I studied pre-law because I liked the logic of it, how rules build on rules until the structure holds weight.
I don’t tell him that I brought my own adhesive tabs from a stationery shop in Boise or that I calculated the flight distance on the plane or that I’ve been in this conference room a while and I can still feel the handshake in my palm.
He listens. That’s the thing. He listens.
His eyes don’t wander. His phone stays in his jacket.
He asks follow-up questions that have nothing to do with law or Keyes or the retainer agreement.
He asks if I miss the mountains. He asks if I cook.
He asks what I read before bed and I tell him mystery novels and he tells me, “Of course you do,” and I don’t know what that means but how he says it makes my ribs feel too small.
He is attentive and warm and charming and something about him in that chair, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, his fingers tapping a rhythm on the armrest that I suspect is unconscious, makes me feel like I’m being interviewed for something that isn’t in the job description.
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 C?te 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.
Daisy Fletcher is the best I’ve ever seen.
The mystery novels. The parents who sent a guidebook to the wrong country.
The colour-tabbed file with its quarter-inch intervals and its yellow category for things that don’t fit but seem relevant.
Every detail is designed to make me believe she’s real, and she delivers them with a sincerity that borders on art.
But the yellow tab nags at me.
Because a woman playing innocent wouldn’t flag a billing discrepancy. A woman playing the game would file it blue and never mention it. A woman who understood what Keyes, Inc. is and how it operates would know that drawing attention to a billing discrepancy is the last thing you do.
Unless the flag was for me. A show of integrity, timed for impact, delivered in front of the client she’s been assigned to impress.
Unless it wasn’t.
The car turns onto the coast road. The Mediterranean opens on the left, all that blue, and I close my eyes and I can see her hands folding in her lap after Kaye shut her down.
They didn’t fold gracefully. They gripped each other.
The knuckles went white. It was the fold of a woman who wanted to disappear, not a woman who was performing.
I’ve read people for years. I’ve built an empire on it.
Andrei handles security, Alexei handles strategy, Artem handles enforcement, and I handle the thing none of them can: I see what people are hiding.
It’s a skill. A weapon. The reason every billionaire I’ve met has sat across from me in rooms like that conference room and told me things they’d never tell their wives.
I have never been wrong.
Daisy Fletcher is performing. The tabs, the blush, the five-thousand-mile calculation, the mystery novels. All of it. She’s her aunt’s project, polished and placed in my path, and the yellow tab was the cleverest move of all because it made me hesitate.
I push it away.
My phone buzzes. The screen lights with a name I don’t ignore.
Alexei.
I answer.
My brother’s voice is the same as always: stripped of warmth, efficient, a blade wrapped in syllables. “The name from Mila’s laptop. The second thread.”
I sit forward. “And?”
A pause. Alexei doesn’t pause for drama. He pauses because the information requires it.
“It connects to Keyes.”
The Mediterranean burns past the window.
The leather creaks under my hands. And the yellow tab, the girl from Idaho, the billing discrepancy she shouldn’t have noticed and shouldn’t have flagged and shouldn’t have mentioned, rearranges itself in my mind into something that has nothing to do with innocence and everything to do with the mole inside our circle who has been feeding information to the man who killed our father.