Page 12 of Power Play

The sentence sits between us. I turn it over in my mind the way I turn a filing, looking at it from every angle, checking for the thing that isn't being said.

"Designed is a specific word."

"It's the right word." He holds my stare, and whatever is behind his eyes right now costs him something to show me. "The firm's deal flow has secondary applications that go beyond what any individual analyst would see from inside the engagement. Your work feeds into a larger operation, Keating. The pressure points you identify in a client's financial structure are being repurposed downstream."

The bar's music fills the silence while I process, the brass section pushing through a lazy phrase that feels very far away. Repurposed. The word is careful, and Kincaid is a careful man. The gap he left around it’s shaped exactly like the thing he's not saying, and I’ve been staring at that shape in the Veridian routing data for days.

"You're telling me my work is being used to take companies apart."

His fingers release the glass.

The silence that follows is his answer.

He doesn't confirm it. He doesn't deny it either, and the space between the two is where the truth lives.

"I'm telling you your work is being used for purposes you weren't told about. What happens downstream of your analyses is bigger than what you signed up for. It lives outside any engagement letter or client mandate that crosses your desk."

"That's not the same as telling me what it is."

"No." His jaw works, the tell running deep, and for a moment the control he wears like a second skin shows its seams. "It's what I can give you tonight."

I should push harder. The Meagan from three days ago, the one who stared at an overwritten transaction record until her coffee went cold, would push harder. She would press until the structure cracked. That Meagan operates on a schedule she sets herself. She answers to standards she built from the wreckage of every time she trusted someone else to set them for her.

The Meagan sitting across from Kincaid in a dark bar in Logan Square on a Friday evening wants to push harder too. But the man across from her just gave her a truth that visibly hurt to release. The evidence is written in the tension along his forearms, the line of his jaw, the white-knuckle grip on his water glass. He's holding it the way he'd hold a weapon, steady and intent, because letting go means reaching for something he shouldn't.

I give him what I learned from Sophia instead of pressing for what he won't give me yet. The Oleander family's proximity to the conspiracy, Sophia's fear, Thomas's likely awareness.

Kincaid listens with the focus he brings to everything, and the quality of his attention has stopped pretending to be professional. It pins me in place the way it did in the corridor at the Cultural Center, except closer and longer and without the gala's crowd to diffuse it.

"You trust her," he says, when I've finished.

"Sophia?"

"You brought me her family's financial exposure. That's trust."

"It's reciprocity. She gave me information. I gave you information. The exchange functions on mutual need."

"Mutual need." He repeats it slowly, and the way he holds the words strips the clinical framing off them until what's underneath is showing. "That what you call driving forty minutes in Friday traffic to a bar you've never set foot in because a man told you he wasn't willing to wait?"

"I call that following a lead."

"You call everything a lead, Keating." He leans forward. The four inches become two. His forearms land on the table, the henley pulling across his shoulders, and the proximity is suddenly specific in a way it wasn't thirty seconds ago. "Even the things that terrify you."

My thumb finds my ring finger on the table, pressing hard into the skin where the ring used to sit. His gaze drops to my hand, then comes back to my face. He caught the gesture. He's been watching my hands as closely as I've been watching his jaw.

The difference is that when I catch myself watching him, I look away. When I catch him watching me, he holds.

"I should go," I say. I stand before the sentence has fully landed. If I wait any longer, the two inches will become zero, and I haven’t yet decided what happens when the distance closes.

He stands when I stand, and standing puts him at full height. The table had been hiding that from me. The breadth of his shoulders blocks the pendant lamp behind him, and I'm standing inside his shadow before I can step back. He doesn't move to give me room.

His hand comes up. My breath catches before I can stop it, a sharp pull low in my chest that I will spend the entire drive home refusing to name. His fingers stop an inch from my jaw, close enough that I can feel the heat of them radiating across the gap, and the almost-touch is worse than anything his hands could have done if they'd landed.

The restraint is deliberate. He's letting me see what it takes to hold the line. I can't tell if that's honesty or a weapon. With Kincaid, the distinction may not exist.

He drops his hand. His jaw is tight enough to cut.

"Lock your door tonight, Keating. Set your alarm."