Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Luca
"Does your father know you're here?"
Her dark brown hair is back from her face, her blue eyes are remarkably steady for someone who should be frightened right now. Two small moles beneath her left eye give her face an asymmetry she is probably unaware of. And her blazer is slightly too formal for her age.
Those blue eyes hold mine and she answers, "I'm not playing with anyone. I'm here for the interview."
She is young, mid-twenties at the most. Slender, medium height, and beautiful. She is wearing heels that she has clearly practiced walking in. It was clear that she thought carefully about what this meeting required of her.
She thought carefully and prepared but she had absolutely no idea where she was.
I sit and she sits too, immediately, straightening her back like she is in a job interview, and I watch her place both hands flat on the table in a gesture that I recognize as someone controlling the urge to fidget.
"I'm not my father," she continues, and there is a quality to her voice that I find difficult to categorize, something that is simultaneously rehearsed and genuine, like she prepared the words but actually means them.
"But I represent him and I can offer something he can't. A personal perspective.
A candid view of who Phillip Keller actually is as a person, not just as a candidate. That's a unique—"
"Does your father know you're here?"
She stops.
I watch it move across her face, the brief disruption of the composure she has assembled so carefully, and then I watch her reassemble it.
"That's not the most important thing right now," she says.
I look at her for a long moment. "Does your father know that you are here?"
"My father has an extremely demanding schedule," she says, and the fact that she maintains eye contact while saying something that is so obviously not an answer is either audacity or desperation and I haven't decided which yet.
"I'm covering for him. He couldn't make it and I am more than capable of representing his—"
I exhale.
I lean back and I look at her and I feel something that I rarely feel in professional contexts, exhaustion, of a situation that is not what it should be through no fault of my own.
The Purple Horizon correspondence had been my team's construction.
A clean channel, untraceable, built specifically to establish a meeting with Phillip Keller outside of any framework people could monitor or interfere with.
I worked with him for a year and exchanged correspondence and meeting times through the Purple Horizon media.
I look at her sitting across from me with her careful posture and her rehearsed confidence and her blue eyes that are working very hard right now.
She has no idea who her father is.
She has no idea what he has done or what he owes or what kind of men he has been making arrangements with since before she was old enough to know that such arrangements existed.
How does one explain to a girl like this that her father is a con man and a murderer who has been climbing toward power over the bodies of people who trusted him?
How does one say to someone with that particular quality of hope in their face that the man they are here defending would not cross a room for them?
I don't have the time and it is not my problem.
"Princess," I say, and I watch the word land, "I'm afraid you are in the wrong room."
Something flickers behind her eyes. She pushes past it. "I can give you exclusive access. I've never spoken to any media outlet before, not once, so whatever I tell you today is information nobody else has. That has real value and—"
"I'm sure it does," I say, and I stand, because this conversation has reached its natural conclusion. "I would love nothing more than to sit here and discuss what a remarkable man your father is." I button my jacket.
"Unfortunately I have actual work to attend to. You should go home. Return to wherever it is you came from and I will deal with Keller directly."
She is holding it together. I can see the effort of it, the particular tension around her eyes, and the way she has pressed her lips together, and the brightness that is gathering that she absolutely does not want to let go of in front of me. She is holding it and she is losing and she knows it.
I roll my eyes before I can decide not to.
"If you can't hold yourself together in a conversation," I say, "how exactly were you planning to handle an interview?
Go home, Princess. Buy some shoes. Be a good girl and let the adults manage the things that are not yours to manage.
You're out of your depth and you've been out of your depth since you walked through that door. "
"Fuck you."
I stop.
She is on her feet and the careful posture is still there but something beneath it has left, the rehearsed quality has disappeared entirely and become something else, else, I note with detached surprise, considerably more interesting than anything she has said since she sat down.
My men move forward.
I raise one hand without looking at them and they stop.
"How dare you speak to me like that?" Her voice is not loud. That surprises me. Anger that is quiet is usually the more serious kind. Her eyes are bright and there is color in her face and she is looking at me like I am something she would like to snap into two. "Who do you think you are?"
"Princess—"
"Yes," she says, and her voice cracks on it, just once, and a tear escapes that she doesn't try to catch.
"Yes, it was stupid. I know it was stupid, I knew it before I got on the plane and I knew it when I walked in here and I know it now.
It was thoughtless and it was stupid and I should not have come.
" She stops. "But how else do I get him to look at me? "
The question sits in the room.
She doesn't wait for an answer. She steps around me, and I feel the brush of her shoulder against my arm as she passes, and then she is through the door and gone and the suite is quiet again.
I stand where I am for a moment.
And then something moves at the edge of my mind. The car, the smell of a parking garage. A woman above me, her hair falling loose around her face, her hands, and the weight of her against me. My hands find her waist and hold it as my chest pounds in tension.
I inhale slowly and I look at the empty doorway.
The woman in that garage was fearless. She pulled a stranger into her car and dug a bullet out of his chest without being asked and had not once looked like she might come apart. This girl was a politician's daughter who had flown to Las Vegas on a misunderstanding and cried in a meeting room.
They were nothing alike.
I grind my jaw and turn to my men.
Keller sent his daughter to a meeting he knew the nature of.
Either the man lost his mind entirely or he was communicating something specific, and either way, it was unacceptable.
Eight months of avoidance and now this. He wanted to play games with my time and my patience and apparently with his own child.
Fine.
"Bring her back," I say.
Costa looks at me. "Boss—"
"She is going to be my collateral." I reach into my jacket for my cigarettes. "Since my dear friend Keller wants to play, I'll give him something to play for."
They nod and move and I listen to their footsteps disappear down the corridor.
I sit back down and light a cigarette and draw from it slowly and look at the empty chair across from me where she had been sitting with her folded hands and her prepared answers. Keller was going to pay for this.
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