6. Weak Spots
Weak Spots
CONNOR
Igave Rachel forty minutes to sleep after the call.
She didn't use them for sleeping. I could hear her moving through the suite, the quiet percussion of cabinet doors and running water and the particular kind of silence a person makes when they're trying to hold themselves together by staying in motion. I know that silence. I've lived inside it.
At five fifty-three, I knocked twice and told her we had ninety minutes before the press conference.
She opened the door already dressed, her face composed, her spine straight, and the only evidence of how the night had gone was the slight shadow beneath her eyes that even skilled concealer couldn't fully erase.
She looked at me like she was daring me to comment on it.
I handed her a coffee instead.
Some battles you win by not fighting them.
The press conference is already running when Rachel leans close to the mic and says, with complete sincerity, "I design for women who have somewhere to be and something to say when they get there."
The room laughs. Not a polite, calculated laugh. A real one.
I watch the Reuters correspondent forget she was supposed to be skeptical.
Watch a fashion blogger in the third row physically press her hand to her chest. Watch thirty members of the international press corps fall a little bit in love with Rachel Nguyen in real time, and feel something I have no vocabulary for settle into the back of my throat.
The Le Figaro correspondent had gone stiff the moment I walked in.
That's standard. I've ended careers and I haven't been careful about who watched me do it.
Fear is a tool like any other, and I've never had a problem deploying it.
In a room full of journalists, my presence reads as a warning shot.
They know it. I know it. We proceed accordingly.
But Rachel doesn't deal in warning shots.
She deals in eye contact and honesty and the kind of warmth that makes people feel genuinely seen.
And the entire press corps is sitting there being genuinely seen.
I am standing at the edge of the room watching her work and thinking, with the cold precision of a man who has assessed threats professionally for fifteen years, that Rachel Nguyen is the most dangerous person in this building.
Not because she's manipulating them.
Because she isn't.
"Mr. Grey." A reporter near the front, emboldened now that the room has loosened up. "Would you characterize your role here as damage control?"
"I'd characterize it as accurate information management." I keep my voice level, my posture easy. Let the room decide whether that's the same thing.
Rachel turns to look at me. Something bright moves through her eyes, some suppressed reaction I can't immediately classify.
"What Mr. Grey means," she says, "is that he's very good at making sure the truth is louder than the alternative."
The room stirs. Somewhere, a camera shutter fires in rapid succession.
"That's an interesting way to describe it," I say, looking back at her directly.
"I'm an interesting person," she says. Doesn't blink.
The room laughs again. Louder this time.
In my earpiece, Webb's dry voice materializes from London: "You two are trending in four countries. I feel genuinely unwell."
I don't react. Not to Webb. Not to the cameras. Not to the fact that when Rachel lifted an eyebrow at me just now, something in my chest did something I intend to examine later, in private, and then never speak of again.
The conference ends. Rachel handles the follow-up questions with the same effortless precision she brings to everything. The press files out looking slightly dazed, the way people look when they've been somewhere they didn't expect to enjoy.
I step aside and check my phone. One missed text. Collin's name on the screen.
Three more sellers. Same buyer. Call me.
Four words back: Tomorrow. You're good.
I pocket the phone before Rachel turns around.
She notices the movement. I can tell by the slight pause in her step, the way her attention sharpens for half a second before she lets it go.
She doesn't ask. She just falls into pace beside me through the lobby.
I am aware, not for the first time, that she notices more than she says.
Webb again, quieter: "Grey Global's New York desk is asking about the Nakamura filing. I've been stalling, but they'd like an actual human at some point."
"Tell them Thursday."
"It is Thursday."
"Tell them next Thursday."
Rachel glances at me sidelong. "Everything okay?"
"Business."
She accepts that. Files it somewhere behind those hazel eyes and doesn't press, and somehow that restraint is more unsettling than the questions would have been.
We have thirty minutes before I have to destroy the evening.
Isabelle Beaumont looks exactly the same as she did three years ago.
Honey-blonde hair swept into an effortless chignon. Hermès scarf draped with calculated casualness. That way she has of looking at you like she's already won something you didn't know was up for grabs.
"Connor." She rises from the velvet settee, her smile sharp enough to cut glass. "You look tense."
"Busy," I say, staying standing.
Rachel is at my shoulder. I can feel the questions radiating off her without looking.
"You said this was urgent."
"It is." Isabelle's gaze moves to Rachel, cataloging, dismissing in under two seconds. "Though I assumed we'd speak privately."
"Ms. Nguyen stays."
A flicker of something crosses Isabelle's face before she gestures toward the chairs. "Suit yourself."
I don't sit. Neither does Rachel.
"Still so rigid, Connor. I'd hoped you might have loosened up since Brussels."
Rachel's posture shifts fractionally beside me. I leave it alone.
"You have two minutes. Then I'm walking out."
"Always so transactional." Isabelle crosses her legs, the movement deliberate and practiced.
"Remember when we weren't? When you actually felt things?"
The barb is expertly placed. It would have landed, once.
Now it just slides off.
"One minute, forty seconds."
Her expression hardens into something more honest. "Fine. Senator Moreau is planning to release additional evidence linking Ms. Nguyen to his operations. Documents, financial records. All fabricated, but convincing enough to finish what's already started."
Rachel goes very still beside me.
"And you know this how?"
"Because I'm the one who helped him create them." Flat. Unapologetic. Like she's discussing a business arrangement that inconveniences no one but us. "I have the originals. The metadata that proves they're forged. Everything you need."
"In exchange for what?"
Her smile returns, slow and predatory. "You. One weekend. Monaco. Like old times."
Rachel makes a sound beside me, half laugh, half something sharper.
Isabelle doesn't look at her. Her eyes stay locked on mine, waiting. And that's the tell, the thing that reveals exactly what this is. She's not here for Monaco. She's here to make Rachel watch me weigh it, to plant the seed that I might, that every man has his calculation and she knows mine.
Then she shifts her gaze to Rachel.
Deliberate. Unhurried. Takes her in and lets the silence do the ugly work. The kind of silence designed to make a woman feel like a problem someone is measuring the cost of.
I move before she finishes the calculation.
My hand finds Rachel's elbow and I step between them, not as a performance, just as a fact.
"No."
Isabelle blinks. "Excuse me?"
"No deal."
"Connor." Her voice drops to something honey-smooth and practiced. She steps closer, bringing the smell of her perfume, expensive and suffocating, and lifts her fingers to my jaw. "Don't be hasty. Think about what you're throwing away."
I don't move. Don't flinch. Don't feel a single thing.
That's actually what ended us in Brussels. Not the betrayal. The fact that even before I knew what she was, I had to work to feel anything when she touched me.
"We're done here."
Her hand drops. For one unguarded second, raw rage moves across her face before the mask locks back into place.
"You're making a mistake."
"I've made plenty. This isn't one of them."
I steer Rachel toward the exit, my hand still at her elbow. Behind us, Isabelle's voice follows us across the bar: "She's not worth it, Connor. Whatever you think this is between you two, it isn't real. It never is with you."
I don't look back.
Rachel is quiet until the elevator doors close on the lobby's gilded excess.
Then: "Monaco."
"Not happening."
"I gathered." She leans against the elevator wall, watching me with that look she gets, the one that means she's already three moves ahead and waiting for me to catch up. "You didn't even negotiate. She had evidence we need."
"Evidence we can get elsewhere." A beat of silence. Then, quieter: "I know."
I look at her.
She holds eye contact. "I know, Connor. I wanted to see what you'd do."
The elevator climbs. I count floors and sit with the fact that she'd been testing me and I hadn't seen it coming, which is not something that happens to me as a general rule.
"She wanted to rattle you," I say. "Make you think I'd trade your career for a weekend."
"And you wouldn't."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because Isabelle doesn't trade fairly. Give her an inch and she'll take the rest and still sell you out for the right price."
"Sounds like you learned that the hard way."
The elevator opens. Eighteenth floor. We walk to her suite in silence, and I should leave it at the door, should hold the careful distance that has kept this professional and contained and not the slow-moving catastrophe I can feel it becoming.
Instead: "Brussels. Three years ago. I was managing a hostile takeover. Isabelle was the CEO's daughter." I lean against her doorframe. "We got involved."
Rachel has her key card in hand but doesn't use it. Just waits.