Chapter Three
Madrigal
The thing about men like Townes Carrington was that their resistance was the attraction.
She had always known this about herself—had known it since she was twenty-two and had decided that the most interesting project in any room was the one that didn't know it was a project.
The men who came to her easily were boring.
They were trophies with no difficulty attached.
But Townes Carrington looked at her across a desk and saw exactly what she was and said no with a calm so complete it was almost architectural, and she wanted to dismantle it piece by piece.
She sat in the car outside the Carrington office building and opened her portfolio on her tablet, scrolling through what she had gathered in the three weeks since she'd been introduced to him at Brycen Henley's dinner party.
She was thorough. She was always thorough.
She had grown up in a family where resources were contested and where the person who got things was never the person who asked for them openly—it was always the one who shaped the circumstances.
Townes was married. She had known that when she started.
It was not, for her, a disqualifying fact.
Marriage was a structure, and structures had weaknesses.
The weakness in this one, from what she could observe, was obvious, the wife was somewhere else, emotionally speaking.
The marriage was cold. Anyone at any of the overlapping social events they all frequented could see it—Townes Carrington standing slightly apart from his wife at gallery openings, Winona Carrington leaving early, the careful not-quite-touching of two people who had stopped being easy with each other.
That coldness was a gap. Madrigal was good at gaps.
She had already begun, carefully. The dinner invitation he'd deflected.
The way she'd touched his arm briefly—purely incidentally—when she'd handed him a document in the conference room.
The personal detail she'd worked into their last meeting, I actually don't have anyone waiting at home for me tonight, said while looking at him in a way that was plausible deniable as wistfulness but was not.
He hadn't taken any of it. He was, she had to admit, more disciplined than most. But discipline was not immunity. Discipline was another word for something suppressed, and suppressed things needed somewhere to go.
She thought about Winona Carrington. She had met her twice, briefly, at social events.
A compact woman with an observant face and a composure that was not coldness but was very controlled.
Madrigal had assessed her with the same attention she brought to everything and had concluded, formidable, but operating from hurt, which made her vulnerable to the particular kind of wound Madrigal was in a position to deliver.
She opened her messages and began composing one to Townes, carefully calibrating the text. Not forward enough to be blocked. Personal enough to suggest intimacy. Something he would answer because the content required a response and answering would create a record that looked like correspondence.
I've been thinking about our last meeting, she wrote. I think there's something we both understood that didn't get said. Can we find a time?
Deliberately ambiguous. Professionally plausible. She sent it and set her phone down and looked out the windshield at the November city and felt the particular pleasure of a game well begun.
She did not think about what it would cost Winona Carrington. Or rather—she thought about it and found that it did not weigh enough to matter.
That, if she had been honest with herself, was the thing she would later wish she had examined.