Chapter 57
Saint
The Crowned Families meet in a room beneath a restaurant in Lower Manhattan with no name on the door, requiring two separate key codes and the word of a man who has been vouching for people in rooms like this for thirty years.
My father vouches for me. It’s getting used to calling a man your father when, most of your life, you wondered who the man was and secretly hated him for abandoning his son and failing his mother.
I walk in alone.
Amy is upstairs in the restaurant proper, at a corner table with a glass of water and her notebook, which is how she handles situations she cannot control.
She makes herself useful to her own mind, which is one of the things about her I find most recognizable.
I have been doing the same thing for years.
Turning inward when the exterior offers nothing to manage.
Downstairs, there are eight men and one woman, arranged around a table that has clearly been the site of decisions that do not appear in any public record.
They are not what I expected, which is perhaps naive.
I expected them to be older, the dark suits and the visible weapons and the performative gravity of organized power.
They all appear to be my age. Heirs to a dynasty with more power than countries.
A man named Domenico sits at the head. He looks at me when I enter with a curious expression. There is no question of who my father is, since I look like my father.
He makes the introductions. Names I will need to learn. Territories. Responsibilities. The architecture of an organization that has been operating for generations and intends to continue.
I sit. I listen.
They ask me questions. Direct questions, the kind that do not have safe answers, the kind that are designed to locate the edges of a person’s honesty.
I answer them directly because directness is the only register I trust and because these are people who will hear an evasion the second it leaves my mouth and will not forget it.
An hour in, the woman across the table, Caterina, late forties, looks at me and says, “You released the Consortium archive. You burned an institution’s forty years of leverage in a single morning. Why should we believe you won’t do the same to us?”
I look at her.
“Because the Consortium used that leverage against people who had no power to resist it,” I say.
“It was built on harm from what the Order couldn’t control.
The Crowned Families’ operations are its own matter and not my jurisdiction to judge.
But if I find that this organization is running anything analogous to what the Order ran, if I find a Prey list, a scholarship selection committee, a system for targeting the vulnerable, I will burn that too.
And I will tell you that now, at this table, before I’m a part of anything, so there is no ambiguity about who I am and what I will and will not protect. ”
The room is very quiet. Caterina looks at Domenico.
Domenico looks at me with something in his face that I have seen once before, in a mirror, on my own face, when Amy said something that reached somewhere I did not know was accessible.
He looks like a man who is proud of something.
“Nonnegotiable,” Caterina says finally, in the tone of someone recording a term in a document that does not exist on paper but is nonetheless binding.
“Nonnegotiable,” I confirm.
She nods once. The meeting continues. Two hours later, I walk back upstairs.
Amy looks up from her notebook when I slide into the chair across from her. She reads my face the way she reads everything, completely, without missing anything.
“Well,” she says.
I pick up her water glass and drink from it.
She is quiet for a moment. “Are they good people?”
I think about Caterina’s question and Domenico’s face and the eight people around the table who did not flinch when I told them what I would and would not tolerate.
“They are people,” I say, “with the full complexity that entails. But they heard me. And they agreed. That is the beginning of something workable.”
She reaches across the table and takes my hand. “Okay,” she says.
We stay at the table for a while in the ordinary noise of the restaurant above a room that does not appear on any record, and I think about what it means to have a name. A real one. The kind that has weight and history and three generations of decisions attached to it.
Saint Devereux, heir to the Deveraux empire and a part of the Crowned Families.
A world organization that funds governments.
Ultimate power and control. They know exactly who I was the moment I walked in.
They know my influence. The sons of Kenyan and their families aren’t to be touched.
It’s all they agreed to, but they also agreed that we have to watch them.
The Order is not to be trusted. They cannot be wiped out except for one.