Page 18 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

SEBASTIAN

The questions linger as she closes the door. Jasmine asked the right ones, she is close to exactly where the truth falls now. She's seen the painting. I almost told her, but the consequences could be brutal for her or me. I lift the phone and call the museum.

"Mr. Crowe." The director answers fast, the way institutions answer when your foundation pays for their roof.

"The Crowe portrait in the east gallery," I say. "I'd like it off the floor today."

"Of course. We can rotate it into storage by?—"

"Not storage. I'm buying it. Whatever the board needs to release it, send the paperwork here this afternoon."

A pause. "It's not technically for sale."

"Everything is. Name the figure." I keep a tone built to end conversations. "Today. No press." He gives the answer I expect, and I end the call

"You can make us vanish in under a minute." Gideon waits in the doorway. I didn't hear him. "Expensive. Pointless."

"It's contained."

"It's buried." He steps in and closes us in. "You bury one and she'll find the next. You know what's happened to other people for years with this type of situation."

"She saw the painting. People resemble their ancestors."

"She's not asking about ancestors. She's asking about you." He doesn't raise his voice; he never has to. "You can't let her go, Sebastian. I've seen how you are with her. So stop pretending the problem is the painting."

I align the objects nearest my hand, though none have moved. "If I admit the truth, she becomes a target. You'd have me hand her danger so my conscience can feel clean."

"I'd have you tell her before someone else with teeth does. She can hear the version from you, or she can have it from a predator out there in a brutal way."

I don't respond. That's the trouble. Recently, I would have had something ready.

He reads the quiet, and goes still with disappointment. "You used to be better at this than your enemies," he says. "You're not anymore." Then he leaves—not slamming the door, closing it with the care of a person who's finished arguing with someone he respects.

I endure it for exactly as long as I can stand, which isn't long. Then I leave my office and cross onto the open floor where she sits.

"Get your coat," I demand.

Jasmine looks up. "Is something wrong?"

"I need air and coffee that doesn't come from our machine, and I'd rather not stand on a sidewalk talking to myself." It comes out unrehearsed, nothing like me. She notices, and grabs her coat anyway.

The corner café is loud, warm, and crowded with strangers who mean nothing to this. She wraps both hands around her cup as if she's cold from the inside out.

"You're not a coffee-break person," she says.

"I'm full of surprises."

"You're really not. That's what makes this strange." She studies me over the rim. "Where'd you grow up? You never say."

"East of here. Smaller than you'd guess." True enough to survive. "My father was particular. About money, about appearances, about being seen the right way. I learned early that safety belongs to whoever asks the questions first."

"That's not really a childhood. That's a strategy."

"In my house they were the same thing."

She nods slowly. "My mom used to make me read the obituaries out loud on Sundays," she says. "Not because she was morbid. She said you could tell everything about a town by what it chose to remember about its dead. Who got two paragraphs, who got two lines." A small laugh. "I figured everyone did that until I was about fourteen."

Such an ordinary thing. A kitchen, a newspaper, a woman teaching her daughter to read the world. Decades have gone into keeping my own history illegible, and she's handing me the trick like a gift. The lie I just gave her tastes worse for it.