Chapter 52
ROGUE
Lydia Vance lives at the top of the nicest building in a city full of nice buildings.
The elevator opens straight into her place, no hallway, no door to knock on, like the rules other people follow stop applying once you're high enough up.
The ceilings go on forever. There's art on the wall that costs more than the entire Rot makes in a year, a wall of glass looking out over the bright, living city, and every inch of it was paid for by a dead one.
I keep my hands at my sides and I don't touch anything.
It all belongs to Rothwell, as far as I'm concerned. Every dollar of it.
She's waiting for us by the window with a drink in her hand, like we're guests.
She's older than the photos the firm keeps on its respectable little website, but she carries it well, the way money lets you.
Silver hair done just so. A suit that probably costs more than Oren's whole sellout coat.
She looks at the four of us coming out of her private elevator and she smiles, warm and gracious, the smile of a woman who has cut a thousand ribbons and meant none of it.
"Vi Renner. We met at your father’s memorial," she says to Vi, like she's delighted. "My goodness. You have his eyes, don’t you. I’d forgotten the amazing resemblance."
I feel the room tighten. Vi doesn't move.
"You knew my father," Vi says.
"I adored your father." Lydia takes a sip of her drink. "One of the few honest men this part of the world ever produced. Such a tragedy, what happened to him."
She tosses out a small, fond smile. "I spoke at his memorial. The whole city wept. You were there, of course, front row, a devastated little thing. I sat with you afterward. Held your hand."
Vi looks like she might vomit.
The woman continues. "I don't expect you to remember, dear. Grief makes a blur of everything. But, please. Sit. You came an awfully long way to see me. The least I can do is hear you out."
Nobody sits.
I've been in a lot of rooms with a lot of dangerous people, and the thing about Lydia Vance, the thing that turns my stomach, is that she isn't afraid.
Not a flicker. She destroyed a city, buried Vi's father, burned my father's shop, and she's standing in a room with the people who came to end her, drinking something amber and expensive, completely certain it'll go her way. Because it always has.
"You know why we're here," Vi says.
"I have a guess." Lydia's smile doesn't waver. "You've found some papers. You've connected some dots. You've worked very hard, and you've come all this way to look me in the eye, and I respect that, I do." She sets her glass down. "So let's not waste each other's afternoon. How much?"
"How much?" Vi repeats.
"For the papers. For your silence. For all of it.
" She says it pleasantly, like she's settling a bill.
"I'm a wealthy woman, dear. I can be a very generous one to people who are reasonable.
You've spent however long living in a, what is it, a shopping mall?
And I can change that with a phone call.
All of you. Walk out of here today and never want for anything again. Name a number. I won't even flinch."
And there it is. The same offer she's made a hundred times. The same one Oren took. The same one that built this whole glass tower out of everything the rest of us lost.
I watch Vi, and I see her not even consider it. Not for a second. I've seen her turn down a way out before, in a hidden room across a dead city, when her father held the door open for her to get out of the Rot. She didn't accept it then. She sure as hell isn't accepting a way out now.
"My father had a chance to take your money once too," Vi says quietly.
"He didn't. That's why he had to die in everyone's eyes, and I had to lose everything, and a whole city had to rot.
Because some people can't be bought. You’ve spent your whole life believing everyone has a price.
My father didn't, so you buried him. Neither do I.
And now, I'm standing in your living room. "
For the first time, something moves behind Lydia's eyes. Not fear yet. Annoyance. The look of a woman not used to the word no.
"You're being sentimental," she says, cooler now.
"Sentiment is a luxury, and quite simply, something you can’t afford, Vi.
Let me be very clear, since you're making me.
I have given a great deal of money to a great many important people in this city.
There is no one you can take your papers to that I don't already own.
You'll hand me a stack of documents and I'll hand it to my lawyers and you'll go back to your mall, and in a year, no one will remember your father's name at all.
" She picks her glass back up. "So. Once more, and then my patience will have run out. How much?"
"Nothing," Vi says. "We don't want anything. And you don't own anyone we sent it to."
The glass stops halfway to Lydia's mouth.
"Sent?" she says.
"A little while ago." Vi's voice doesn't rise.
It doesn't need to. "Before we ever got in your elevator.
Everything my father spent his life building, everything the firm thought it buried, everything with your name finally on it is now out.
Not to anyone in this city but everywhere else.
Outlets in a dozen places you don't own, agencies you can't buy, people who have been waiting years for this. "
Vi tilts her head and continues. "You invited us up here to handle us. You didn't understand there was nothing left to handle. It was done before we walked in. We just wanted to be here when you found out."
I watch it happen. I watch a lifetime of certainty drain out of Lydia Vance's face in real time.
She sets the glass down carefully, like she no longer trusts herself not to spill.
She crosses to a side table, picks up a phone, makes a call.
Nobody stops her. There's nothing to stop.
We can see it in the way she stands there, the way whoever's on the other end is already talking too fast, the way her free hand comes up to her mouth.
When she turns back around, the gracious lady is gone. What's left is just a frightened old woman in an expensive suit in a glass room that doesn't belong to her anymore.
"You have no idea what you've done," she says, and her voice gone thin and ugly. "Do you have any idea who I am?"
"Yeah," Vi says. "We do. That's the whole point."
And that's it. That's the last name falling. No fists, no blood, no big speech. Just a woman learning that the floor she built on top of all of us was never as solid as she thought, in a room with the people she stepped on to build it.
We don't gloat. We don't even stay. There's nothing here we want, including the satisfaction of watching her lose her shit, and besides, Vi's already turning for the elevator with her chin up and her father's name finally clean.
I'm the last one in. Before the doors close, I take one more look at all that glass and stolen light.
And I think about a motorcycle shop on Delaney Street. My grandfather's name on the sign. My father in the back with the radio going. The polite man who came to make him an offer, and the fire three weeks later, and years of carrying a burden I never knew what to do with.
It doesn't bring the shop back. It doesn't bring my father back, wherever he is. Nobody ever answered for what they did to us. Today though, somebody did, and I was standing right there to watch it happen.
The doors close on Lydia Vance.
We go home.