Page 16 of The Glass Empire
He raises an eyebrow. "Suit?"
"That's what I call you in my head. Since you won't tell me your real name."
"I have told you my real name."
"You've told me a name. That's not the same thing."
He sits on the same stool he always sits on—I've been watching for long enough to know that now—and she pours him coffee without being asked. Black. No sugar. She knows his order. She's learned it, the way you learn the preferences of someone you're starting to care about.
I sit in my corner and watch, and I feel something twist in my chest.
It's not jealousy. I don't get jealous. Jealousy is for people who aren't sure of their place in the world, and I have never been uncertain about anything in my life.
It's something else. Something that tastes like curiosity and hunger and a cold, calculating recognition of opportunity.
My father hasn't looked at a woman since my mother died. I was twelve when she passed—old enough to understand what I'd lost, young enough to still need a mother. He never remarried. Never dated. Never so much as glanced at anotherwoman with anything resembling interest. I assumed he'd closed that part of himself off, buried it with her in whatever grave he'd chosen for his heart.
But here he is. Sitting in a diner at two in the morning, drinking coffee he doesn't need, eating pie he doesn't want, just to be near a farm girl with steady hands.
This is a problem.
My father's attention is a dangerous thing. It's also a limited resource, and he's been pouring it into the empire for so long that I'd forgotten what it looked like when he spent it on something else. On someone else.
If he's distracted—if he's soft—the empire is vulnerable. And the empire is mine. Not yet, not officially, but someday. I've been training for this my whole life. I've been bleeding for it, killing for it, building my own network within his network so that when the time comes, the transition will be seamless.
I can't let some diner girl get in the way of that.
But I'm also not stupid.
My father is not a man who falls easily. If she's caught his attention, there's a reason. Something about her that I haven't seen yet, something that exists beneath the surface of that pretty face and those steady hands.
I watch them for two hours.
I watch her talk—about the farm, about her father, about a calf named Mercy that she delivered when she was ten years old. I watch him listen, really listen, the way he used to listen to my mother when she told him about her day. I watch the way she touches his hand when she sets down his pie—just a brush, just a moment, but I see the way his fingers curl toward hers like they're drawn by gravity.
I watch him smile again. Real smile. Three times in one night. I've never seen that before.
And I watch her.
The way she looks at him when she thinks he's not looking. The way her eyes soften, just slightly, just enough. The way she bites her lower lip when he says something that surprises her.
She's falling for him. Or she's already fallen, and she doesn't know it yet.
Either way, it doesn't matter.
What matters is what I'm going to do about it.
I leave before they do. Slip out the back, through the kitchen, past a cook who's too busy scraping the grill to notice me. The alley behind the diner smells like garbage and piss, and I lean against the brick wall and light another cigarette and let myself think.
My father is seventy-two hours away from making a mistake. I can feel it the way I can feel a storm coming—a pressure in the air, a shift in the wind. He's going to bring her into the fold. Not yet, maybe, but soon. He's going to want to protect her, and protection means proximity, and proximity means exposure.
And exposure means she becomes a weakness.
Unless I make her something else.
Unless I get to her first.
I don't know what that would look like yet. I don't know if I want her for myself or if I want to use her as leverage or if I just want to understand what my father sees in her that I can't see. But I know one thing with absolute certainty:
