6. Quinn #3
This time Helena’s lips twitched.
There it was. Not approval, not exactly.
But something alive enough to make the back of my neck warm.
She still hadn’t said more than six words since the whole thing began, but her silence had changed texture.
She no longer looked like she was assessing the fallout. She looked like she was reassessing me.
James exhaled and pulled his legal pad closer. “You are not to freelance negotiations with clients in the corridor.”
“Understood.”
“You are not to invoke mythological bargaining customs without at least a passing awareness of whether they remain legally or socially binding.”
I opened my mouth to retort, thought better of it, and settled on, “Also understood.”
“And you will remember,” he said, pointing his pen at me, “that getting something right does not retroactively make the method wise.”
That, unfortunately, was true enough that I could only nod.
“Good,” he said. “Get the hell out of my office.”
I stood at once.
Moira held the door open for me. I glanced back at Helena.
She was looking down at the files now, one hand resting lightly over the closed folder that contained Mr. Virelli’s case materials.
But before I stepped out, she met my gaze, and though her expression barely changed, I had the unmistakable sensation of being weighed and, for the moment at least, not found wanting.
Then Moira was ushering me into the hall and shutting the door behind us.
For three full steps, I said nothing.
Neither did Moira.
Then, because I wasn’t a saint, I whispered, “Was that as bad as it could have been?”
She stopped walking and gripped my elbow.
There are moments when a person’s face can tell you their entire professional history. The years of being underestimated. Delight in competence. Irritation at carelessness. The deeply buried, very specific affection for chaos when it serves the right end.
Moira held my gaze for one long second and I saw all of that in it.
Then she said, “That was one of the most reckless things I’ve ever seen an intern do.”
I nodded solemnly.
She folded her arms. “And one of the smartest.”
My surprise must’ve shown, because her lips curved upward.
“Don’t get used to hearing that from me,” she said. “Or from Payton. He’s furious because you seized an opportunity before anyone senior did, and now he has to pretend this is about decorum.”
I stared at her.
Moira’s tone remained dry, but there was something warmer underneath it now, something that felt almost like welcome.
“You saw the room,” she said. “You saw the pressure point. You understood the client’s emotional logic, the firm’s wariness, and your own leverage…
In under ten seconds. Then you moved.” She tipped her head.
“That’s lawyering. Messy, ill-advised, hierarchy-destroying lawyering, but lawyering all the same. ”
A laugh escaped me before I could help it. “I genuinely thought you were going to kill me.”
“Please. That would be far too much paperwork.”
That made me laugh so hard, I had to clap my hand to my mouth to contain it.
Moira waited until I came back down from it, then said more quietly, “You’ve got a real mind for this, Quinn. Not just the knowledge or the formatting. The instinct. The appetite. Don’t let anybody turn that into something smaller because it inconveniences them.”
The words hit harder than I was prepared for.
I’d spent so much of the internship trying to be useful in ways that wouldn’t get me noticed for the wrong reasons.
I had trained myself to be fast, pleasant, flexible, impossible to resent.
I knew how to make myself indispensable.
It was much harder, and much rarer, for someone to look straight at me and tell me they saw all that.
So, naturally, I made a joke.
“Well,” I said, blinking once and aiming for light, “I’m absolutely putting ‘hierarchy-destroying lawyering’ on my résumé.”
Moira snorted. “Don’t. HR has no imagination.” She glanced back at Payton’s office and lowered her voice. “For what it’s worth, Wallace looked like she wanted to be mad but couldn’t quite muster the energy.”
I looked over my shoulder before remembering Helena Wallace was on the other side of a closed door. “Really?”
Moira sighed. “Don’t start preening. It’s unattractive.”
“Too late. Internally, I’m unbearable.”
“That, I already knew. Now, that’s all the compliments you’re getting from me,” Moira said. “I still despise interns on principle.” She shifted the legal pad to her other arm. “Go back to work. Virelli’s team will be finalized this afternoon. And, Quinn?”
“Yeah?”
Her expression sharpened just a little, back into that smart, tired, lethal competence that had first made me want her approval in the first place. “Next time you decide to bargain with a supernatural apex predator in the hallway, give me thirty seconds’ warning.”
I smiled. “I’ll try.”
“No, you won’t.”
“No,” I admitted. “Probably not.”
She shook her head, but she was smiling now, however faintly, and then she turned away toward the elevators.