CHAPTER 17
Ada
The laugh came down the stairwell like a dropped glass, bright and small and unmistakably mine to protect, and every drop of blood in my body turned to ice water.
I did not look at the door. Looking at the door would have been a confession. Instead I closed the sample case on the table between us with two soft clicks, and I stood, and I said, in the voice I’d built out of nothing across four hard years, “I think we’ve covered what we came to cover.”
Across the table, Sebastian blinked at me. He’d expected another hour. He’d expected the founder of Maison Cendre to be grateful for the room, for the water in the crystal, for the audience with the great machine. I gave him a smile with no floor under it.
“My assistant will send the accord profiles.” A beat. “Mr. Vale.”
He hadn’t spoken since the laugh. He was still half-risen from his chair, one hand flat on the table, and his face.
God, his face was coming apart in slow motion, recognition surfacing through it like something rising from deep water.
The grey eyes I had once believed I’d grow old inside were fixed on me the way a man looks at a ghost he has personally buried.
I turned before it could finish. Before the knowing in his face could reach his mouth.
I walked.
The corridor outside was cool and marble and endless, and I moved down it with my heels striking hard and even, because slow was the same as caught.
My pulse was a drum in my throat. The laugh.
The stairwell. Theo. He was supposed to be one floor up in the apartment with Delphine and a box of colored pencils and a lion he’d been drawing since breakfast: safe, invisible, an ocean and an alias away from the one room in this building I should never have let them put me in.
Copper hair. Steel-grey eyes. My son wore his father’s eyes like a verdict, and there was not a person alive who could stand Theo next to Sebastian Vale and fail to do the arithmetic.
No one could see them in the same building. Not the staff. Not the cameras. Not him.
I got my phone out without breaking stride and thumbed the message blind, three words to Delphine because three was all my hands could manage.
Back stairs. Now. Then, because the panic wanted more and I refused to feed it: Don’t stop.
She’d understand. Delphine had been reading the shape of my fear since the night I landed in Paris five weeks pregnant with nothing but a portfolio and the pale mark where a wedding ring had been.
She’d have Theo in the service elevator before the ink of my text was dry, out through the loading dock and into the car and gone from this glass cathedral, and no one would ever know a small grey-eyed boy had laughed inside it.
The old vow rose in me the way it always did, whole and hard and older than the panic.
Over my dead body. I had said it to myself in a gallery behind a stage while my husband told me I was nothing without his name.
I had said it on a plane over the Atlantic with my hand pressed to a stomach no one knew held his child.
He will not fold this one into the machine.
He will not name it and brand it and credit someone else with the making of it.
Theo was the one thing in the world Sebastian Vale had never bought, never signed, never smelled coming.
He was mine. He would stay mine.
The wound I’d sealed four years ago had torn open somewhere back in that conference room, and it was bleeding adrenaline now, clean and cold and useful.
I could smell my own fear under the perfume I wore (the good one, the private one, the one I never sold) and I hated that even now some traitor part of me had wondered, walking in this morning, whether he would know the scent I’d once built for him.
I told myself he hadn’t. I told myself I’d killed the meeting cleanly, that I’d be in the car in ninety seconds, that Delphine already had Theo, that I’d be a wheels-up memory before Sebastian’s stalled mind caught up to what it had seen.
I was wrong about all of it.
I heard the conference door open behind me. I heard it not close: no soft click, no murmur of a man returning to his board. I heard footsteps, unhurried, certain, the walk of someone who has never once had to run because the world simply waited for him to arrive.
I did not slow down. The elevator was thirty feet away. Twenty. I kept my eyes on the brushed-steel doors and my breath in my chest and my son somewhere below me, going, gone, safe.
Ten feet.
His voice caught me in the empty corridor like a hand closing on the back of my neck.
“Rousseau.” Quiet. Almost gentle. The way he’d once said muse. “Your mother’s maiden name.”
I stopped. I couldn’t help it. My body stopped before my will could veto it.
“I built you a lab once, Ada.” A pause, and I heard the smile in it, and the terror, and the four years. “Did you think I wouldn’t know your hands?”