26. Still Getting Started #3
That landed harder than I wanted it to.
"So what happens if you're wrong?"
"I find another approach by tonight."
A pause.
"I don't think that's the problem we're going to have."
I set my coffee on the concierge desk.
It had gone cold anyway.
Gideon Cross stood very still through all of it.
Not the stillness of a man enduring an argument.
The stillness of a man running numbers I couldn't see.
When I finished, he waited two seconds.
The same two seconds his eyes had held mine across the lobby.
"Your call," he said. "I'll work with whatever you decide."
His hands flexed once at his sides.
Fingers straightening.
Then settling.
Small.
Contained.
The only sign the words had cost him anything.
I tucked it away with the rest.
A man trained to bury his reactions, working harder at burying this one than the conversation should have demanded.
His wolf, maybe.
Answering mine.
Something pulled tight behind my ribs.
No one had handed me a decision without an agenda attached in years.
Maybe ever.
For one unguarded breath, I imagined what it would be like to be chosen by a man like this instead of assigned to one.
Wanted.
Not weighed.
Then I folded the thought small, the way I folded away everything I couldn't afford.
"The logic holds," I said. "I'll take the cover."
A courier pushed through the service door behind Eduardo's desk, arms full of packages, moving fast toward the mail room.
Gideon's whole body shifted half an inch before I registered the sound.
Weight settling onto the balls of his feet.
One hand already loose and ready at his side.
Gone as fast as it came.
The courier dropped a box on the counter and left.
"Sorry," Gideon said.
Low.
Almost to himself.
"Side door. I don't like side doors I haven't cleared."
"Neither do I. I clocked that one on move-in day."
Something flickered behind his eyes.
Not quite surprise.
Closer to recalculation.
"Good."
Because the threats were real.
Because the legal exposure was documented.
Because sixty percent wasn't a rounding error, and I'd built a whole life on choosing what was strategically correct over what I wanted.
Not because of the warmth still printed into my palm.
Not because my wolf had settled against the inside of my chest like she'd found something she had no intention of giving back.
I signed the cover brief with my own pen.
Black ink.
Sharp signature.
The same one I'd put on three hundred diplomatic documents.
He took it without comment.
My wolf was not quiet.
I told her, with the authority of a woman who'd held this line for eight years, that she didn't get a vote.
She didn't appear to hear me.
Gideon moved toward the elevator with my signed cover brief, and I expected the meeting to end there.
Logistics complete.
Next steps set.
He stopped three steps away.
His back to me.
The pause wasn't transition.
It was preparation.
"The threats were written by someone who knows your schedule in detail."
His voice stayed even, but something underneath it had shifted.
"Meeting times. Venues. Your preferred entry points."
A beat.
"Not your public calendar. Your working calendar."
The lobby felt smaller.
"I'll need your last three months of correspondence by morning."
He turned, and his eyes found mine with that same sharpening.
"Everyone you've worked with. Everyone who requested a meeting. Everyone who confirmed your routing."
"That's every active negotiation I'm running. Trade corridor talks with the Eastern bloc. The charter dispute I'm mediating for Ashveil. If any of that leaks—"
"It doesn't leave this building unencrypted, and it doesn't leave my hands."
No hesitation.
"I'm not building a case against you. I'm building a list of everyone who had the access to sell you."
"You think it's someone inside a negotiation."
"I think whoever's selling you knows your calendar better than your assistant does."
He held the elevator door open with one hand.
"That narrows it to people close enough to watch you work. Not people who read about you."
Steel gray, his eyes.
In the morning light, almost silver at the edges.
"Someone in your professional circle is feeding your movements to the network that wants you acquired."
He let it sit there.
Cold.
Solid.
"The threats are a warning shot. The operation's already running."
The elevator opened behind him.
"Who," I said.
Not a question.
A demand.
"I don't know yet."
He stepped inside.
"But I will."
The doors closed over his face.
Contained.
Watchful.
Seeing something in me I hadn't given him permission to see.
I stood in my own lobby, coffee gone cold, wolf pressed bright and insistent against my ribs.
Someone in my professional circle.
I ran the list without meaning to.
Veil Council aides from the preliminary negotiations.
Northern Conclave brokers who'd requested bilateral meetings.
Staff who handled my calendar.
Faces I'd trusted with logistics, with timing, with the small vulnerabilities that pile up when you work close to people for months.
One of them had looked at my schedule and decided I was worth more as a commodity than a colleague.
It should have made me angry.
It did, somewhere beneath the surface.
A cold fury I'd learned to bank and burn slowly.
But what surfaced first was older.
Familiar down to the bone.
My father taught me this lesson at twenty-two, the first time I brought him something real.
An alliance I'd negotiated myself.
He took it apart in forty minutes because it cost him a marriage arrangement I hadn't known was on the table.
I wasn't a diplomat to him.
I was a piece.
Someone had looked at me and seen the same thing.
I picked up my cold coffee and walked toward the elevator, and my wolf pressed against my ribs with the low, patient certainty of something that had waited a long time in the dark and had finally been given a direction.
By midnight, I'd sent him three months of my working life in one encrypted transmission.
Every meeting.
Every name that might have sold me out.
Gideon Cross knew something about the threat against me that I didn't.
And the man I'd just agreed to perform belonging with might already know exactly who had betrayed me.