Chapter 22 #2
Her heart lurched into her throat. “Wait,” she said, before she could stop herself. “He—he didn’t—”
Three things happened at once.
Hale’s hand closed hard over her wrist.
Morris’s eyes snapped to her, warning flaring like a silent alarm.
And one of the suited men stepped cleanly into her line of sight.
The next sound was very small. A muffled pop, more like a door closing down the hall than anything cinematic. For a split second, Norah’s mind refused to interpret it.
Then Trip’s body jerked.
A dark bloom spread across the front of his immaculate shirt, stark against the white. His knees buckled. The man who had fired the gun stayed steady, his arm extended and his face impassive.
Harrington hit the floor. Norah’s stomach pitched as the room tilted.
She’d never seen a man die before.
She’d seen news reports. Accident footage. Cold case files in tidy PDFs. Numbers in casualty columns. She’d said the words statistical impact about events that had ruined lives.
But this was a human body crumpling two strides away from her shoes.
This was a strangled, wet sound that might’ve been a breath.
Might’ve been his last attempt at one. This was blood soaking into the tasteful carpet of a luxury hotel while hundreds of elites danced and sipped champagne a hundred feet away.
Her hand flew to her mouth. The perfume and lemon polish and champagne all soured into something she could taste at the back of her throat.
Hale’s grip tightened, but he didn’t flinch.
Senator Morris didn’t scream or recoil at all. She merely exhaled slowly, as if Trip had been an unpleasant agenda item finally crossed off the list.
“Unfortunate,” Morris said. “He was quite talented. Up to a point.”
“Talent is nothing without reliability,” Sidarov replied.
She stepped closer to the body with the bored disinterest of someone inspecting a spilled drink. Then she turned to Hale.
“Congratulations,” she said. “It appears you have just been promoted. I find myself in need of a new financial manager.”
Hale inclined his head, expression sober. “I’ll do what’s necessary.”
Norah’s ears rang.
She looked between Hale and the cooling shape on the floor. The air felt too thin. Or too thick. Her vision tunneled at the edges.
She had found the anomalies in the NorthBridge files. She had pushed and worked around the data blocks. She had made noise within Summit and brought in Black Tower and called the SEC.
Now Trip Harrington was dead. Because she’d done her job well.
Guilt slammed into her, sharp and irrational and total. It didn’t matter that Trip had been laundering money for a criminal network. It didn’t matter that he’d chosen this. She couldn’t get past the chain.
She dug. They noticed. He died.
Sidarov’s gaze slid back to her, assessing.
Norah froze.
“Do not look so stricken, Ms. Winslow,” Sidarov said. “No one in this room died innocent. Harrington understood the risk when he took the first payment. He enjoyed the rewards. He knew the cost.”
Her eyes softened, fractionally. “But you . . . you are different.”
Norah’s mouth was dry. “I don’t—”
“You saw numbers that did not add up,” Sidarov continued, as if Norah hadn’t spoken.
“You followed them. You were . . . what is the word . . . relentless.” The corner of her mouth tilted.
“I like that. There are very few minds precise enough to see the patterns we build. Fewer still who have the courage to keep pulling once they do.”
“I wasn’t—” Norah swallowed. “I was just doing my job.”
“Exactly,” Sidarov said. “And you did it well. So well that you have made yourself very important. To us. To Richard. To Senator Morris.” Her gaze flicked between them, reminding Norah exactly whose room this was.
“Important people are valuable, Ms. Winslow. As long as they remember which way the current flows.”
Something in Norah’s chest shuddered.
“Richard tells me you are loyal,” Sidarov went on. “Smart. Discreet. That with the right . . . framing . . . you can help ensure that what happened with Harrington never happens again.”
Richard tells me.
He’d been talking about her to Saltykova? Preparing for this. Preparing her? Hale’s thumb stroked once along the inside of her wrist, a subtle touch that felt suddenly like a shackle.
“Norah understands what’s at stake,” he said calmly. “She may have been . . . overzealous in her initial concern. But she sees the bigger picture now. Don’t you?”
Her tongue felt thick. Words stuck behind her teeth.
Did she see it?
She saw Trip on the ground.
She saw Hale standing over him, unshaken.
She saw Morris, serene in the corner like this was just another necessary vote.
She saw Sidarov, pleased.
She saw herself, reflected in the dark window—a woman in a black gown with blood on the hem if she looked too closely.
“Yes,” Norah heard herself say, voice thin and far away. “I . . . I understand.”
Sidarov watched her for a long beat.
Then she smiled, a small, satisfied curve.
“Good,” she said. “Then I am not worried.”
The man with the gun moved forward again, this time with a length of plastic sheeting and practiced efficiency. Trip’s body was rolled, wrapped, and contained. Another man opened a side door Norah hadn’t noticed before. The whole thing took less than a minute.
Confrontation. Execution. Cleanup. Logistics.
Morris finished her champagne.
“We’ll leave you to coordinate the boring parts, Ksenia,” she said, setting the glass on a side table.
“Richard, Norah, it will be important for you both to be visible in the ballroom for a bit longer. Nothing out of the ordinary. We don’t want anyone thinking tonight is anything but a celebration. ”
Her gaze brushed over Norah, assessing. “Can you manage that?”
Norah’s throat worked. “Yes,” she whispered.
Another lie.
“Excellent.” Morris’s smile returned, polished as ever as she handed everyone glasses of champagne. “You did well tonight, Norah. Truly. I’m glad Richard brought you into the fold.”
Brought you into the fold. The phrase scraped across her, slicing her into ribbons.
Sidarov inclined her head, already half-turned back to the window with a champagne flute between her fingers. “We will speak again soon, Ms. Winslow. There are many places your talents can be put to use. Tonight is a very important night for us, after all.”
Norah felt the hair on her neck rise at Sidarov’s ominous pronouncement.
“To the future,” Senator Morris said as she raised a glass in a toast.
“Hear, hear!” said Richard cheerfully.
It took everything Norah had not to immediately lose the swallow of champagne she forced down.
Oh God, what have I done?