Chapter 8
REMY
We take separate flights.
The dress was already chosen, already packed. The only thing left was getting to New York without anyone knowing we were coming.
Sophie DuBois had the event intel waiting by the time we landed — buyer names, venue confirmation, flagged Iron Choir contacts. Sophie's Lyon PD, technically, but she's been running intel for Cerberus off the books long enough that the line between the two stopped mattering years ago.
Isabella knew it. At the airport she took her boarding pass from Sophie's courier, tucked it into her bag without a word, and walked away from me without looking back.
That was hours ago. The space she left behind still has weight.
The Knickerbocker puts us on an upper floor, two rooms connected by an interior door I keep unlocked.
Luc has his own arrangements — one of his New York contacts keeps a place in Midtown, and my brother has never needed looking after.
Isabella lands after me, checks in clean, and appears in the connecting doorway still in travel clothes: dark trousers, a silk blouse the color of cream, hair pulled back with the kind of effortless precision that takes years to learn.
Maman's emerald dress hangs in a garment bag over her arm.
"Anyone follow you from the airport?" I ask.
"Two men on the same flight." She crosses to the window, looks out at Midtown without touching the glass. "Wrong shoes for the suits. You said that's how you spot the ones trying not to look like what they are."
"They follow you out?"
"No."
"Good catch."
"Hard to forget a lesson like that." Her mouth curves. "What's the timeline?"
"Event starts at eight. Luc's contact confirmed the venue: a private function at a townhouse on East 70th.
Invitation-only, hosted by an international energy consortium.
The kind of gathering where half the guests have legal cover and half don't bother.
" I set the tablet on the desk. "Asset's name is Lorelai.
Blonde, mid-forties, red dress. She'll make contact, pass what she has on buyer names and the delivery timeline. "
"And after we have names?"
"We start dismantling the network." I scroll further into Sophie's brief. She's flagged three Iron Choir contacts, possible attendance, unconfirmed. The second name stops me cold.
Dr. Stefan Brenner. Iron Choir synthesis chemist. Responsible for adapting at least two externally sourced research programs for weapons-grade application. Consider armed. Consider dangerous.
"Isabella." I turn the tablet toward her.
She reads it. It was the look of a scientist who'd already suspected the answer and hoped she was wrong.
"I know his work. He published papers on aerosolized dispersion mechanics several years back.
I cited him. The methodology was foundational to my delivery system.
" She pauses. "If anyone translated my research into a weapons application, it was him. "
"Sophie built your cover around the event profile. European energy consultancy, industrial chemical procurement background. The invitation puts you in that room legitimately." I hold her gaze. "Brenner knows your name and your published work. He's never been in the same room as you."
She's quiet for a moment, turning it over. "We've never met. Only through the literature."
"Keep it that way. You identify the research if it comes up in conversation. Nothing more. You don't negotiate, don't volunteer information, don't improvise. Understood?"
She holds my gaze. "Understood."
She says it with an evenness that means she's heard me and made no promises. I recognize it now. The argument will come when it becomes necessary, which tells me she's thinking like an operative instead of a scientist.
Later, she walks out of the bathroom in emerald silk, and the operational timeline goes quiet.
Maman's dress does something different to her in Manhattan than it did in New Orleans.
There, it was a woman trying on a role. Here it fits the way armor fits, close and functional, an extension of who she is rather than a costume laid over it.
Her hair is up, a few strands loose at her jaw.
Small gold earrings catch the light. The heels add height she doesn't need.
"Well?" she asks. Her tone is dry, the way it gets when she's steadier than she lets on.
"You'll do," I say.
Her mouth curves. She knows exactly what I mean.
Luc meets us on the block over, runs his eyes over us both with the professional detachment of a man checking equipment before a drop. He nods once. We go in.
The townhouse on East 70th sits between a consulate and a private equity firm, unremarkable from the street except for the security at the door.
Two men with the particular stillness of professionals who stopped pretending to be decorative years ago.
Inside, the event runs three floors. Tall ceilings, period molding, the smell of hothouse flowers and expensive perfume layered over something older and drier beneath: old money, or a very good imitation of it.
A string quartet works through something Viennese in the rear salon.
Waitstaff move through the crowd with champagne and canapés, their expressions trained to the same pleasant blankness.
The guests are everything the brief promised: energy executives, defense contractors, a scattering of Eastern European money, and at least two faces I recognize from Cerberus watch lists. Men who made fortunes in markets where the product has a body count.
Isabella takes a glass of champagne from a passing tray, lifts it, doesn't drink. She's moving her attention through the room in the natural social patterns we'd gone over in New Orleans, not sweeping, not obvious, just interest that is actually inventory.
"Three o'clock," she says, voice low under the quartet. "Grey suit. That posture. Prague."
I count three beats before looking. He's past fifty, compact build, grey suit, the stillness of someone shaped by Soviet-era military structure. Not a buyer. Security for a buyer.
"Good eyes," I say.
The quartet shifts into something slower, and the floor between the salon and the main room fills with a handful of couples moving with the practiced ease of people for whom dancing at events like this is simply a social language.
Luc catches my eye from across the room, tips his head slightly toward Lorelai, red dress, blonde hair, working the far end of the room with a glass of champagne and the kind of laugh that's designed to be overheard.
Not yet. I let her orbit.
"Dance with me," I say to Isabella.
She turns from the room's inventory. Something moves in her expression: quick, warm, controlled almost immediately. "Is that tactical?"
"It keeps us visible without being stationary. Harder to surveil a moving target." I offer my hand. "And it gives us a reason to be close enough to talk."
She takes my hand. Her fingers are cool from the champagne glass, steady, and she walks onto the floor with me as though we've done this a hundred times.
I draw her in, right hand at her spine, the particular pressure that says something without saying it, and she comes without hesitation, settles against me at exactly the right distance.
We're close enough that I can feel the warmth of her.
We move. She follows my lead with the fluid attentiveness she brings to everything, adapting in real time, anticipating my direction before I've completed it.
Her hand rests on my shoulder, fingers light, and she keeps her chin level, eyes moving through the room over my shoulder with the discipline of someone who's learned to work while appearing entirely relaxed.
The silk of her dress shifts under my hand as we turn, warm fabric over warmer skin, and the scent of her, something clean and faintly floral, not perfume but her, cuts through the hothouse roses and expensive cologne that saturate the room.
Her spine is straight under my palm. She trusts my lead completely.
A woman who trusts you like that, you start wanting to deserve it for reasons that have nothing to do with the mission.
Every man we pass looks at her. I file each one, not jealousy, I tell myself, tactical awareness, but the distinction is getting harder to maintain.
"Lorelai's shifting position," she says.
"I know. Not yet."
I tighten my hand fractionally at her spine and steer us through a slow turn, bringing her closer in the process.
She doesn't resist. Her body adjusts against mine with the naturalness of something rehearsed, though we've never done this before, and through the thin layer of emerald silk I can feel the warmth of her hip, her ribs, the measured rise and fall of her breathing.
Steady. She's steadier than I am right now, which is not a thing I'd admit to anyone.
Then, just beside my ear: "You clean up well, Remy Pascal."
"Don't get attached to the tux."
She laughs, low and genuine, and it moves through her body into mine.
Under my jacket the Glock sits exactly where it belongs.
The entire room is a threat map I've been building since we walked in.
And I'm thinking about the sound of her laughing and the way her breath was warm against my jaw when she said my name.
That's a problem I'll deal with later.
Lorelai approaches on the edge of the next song. She slides past us with the easy navigation of a woman who learned early how to work a room, and the pass is clean, a folded card against Isabella's arm, gone before the measure ends.
I steer us off the floor, toward the windows at the far end.
"Read it," I say.