Page 3 of Power Play

I delete two different versions of my warning before I settle on something smaller, something that says less while meaning more, because that's the only kind of honesty I've ever been any good at.

I'd rather not,

I send instead.

The pause that follows is long enough that I picture her reading it twice, hunting for the same gap I hunt for in hers. When her reply comes, it's shorter than anything else she's sent tonight.

Yeah. Me neither.

I'm smiling before I know I'm doing it, an actual smile, alone in an empty loft at an hour when nobody's watching to make it worth performing. I catch myself in the dark window glass and stop, because a man doesn't get to keep a face like that once he notices he's wearing it.

I set the phone down on the counter face up. Turning it face down would be admitting the message did something to me, and I've spent most of my adult life not admitting things like that to an empty room. I drink the whiskey anyway, warm now, barely tasting it going down.

The screen lights again before I've finished the glass. A different name. The shift in my chest is instant, want dropping out from under me and something colder sliding into the space it left.

Need you for a new engagement. Time-sensitive. Details tomorrow, 8 AM, my office.

Content first. Then architecture. That's how I've learned to read everything that comes from Arthur, and tonight I can't tell if I'm reading him clearly or reading him the way I want to. A time-sensitive engagement, requested the same night Priest tells me something's changed behind the archive walls and nobody's said why. Arthur doesn't do casual asks. Every request is a shape that looks natural and a function that tests something specific, and I couldn't yet say whether tomorrow's is aimed at my loyalty in general or the exact window of time I've been spending near his protégée.

He's summoned me to that office more times than I like counting, and every time turned out to be a test I didn't recognize until I was already three moves into failing it or passing it. I've beaten that game before. If he's connected any of it to her, tomorrow isn't a test. It's an execution with better lighting, and I'll be the one sitting across the desk from the man holding the trigger. I've walked into that office believing I had the advantage of not being afraid. Tonight I can't say that with a straight face, not even to myself.

Either way the answer's the same. I’ll show up. I’ll take the assignment. I’ll play the part I've played for years, the man who does what's asked and doesn't ask why, because the day I start asking why is the day Arthur starts wondering what changed.

I look at Meagan's last message one more time before I answer his. Yeah. Me neither. Three words that shouldn't weigh anything and weigh more than the glass in my hand. I type my reply to Arthur, three words, the kind of clean confirmation he expects from the men he built.

I'll be there.

I set the phone face down. The loft holds its quiet around me, the specific quiet of a space built for one man who's spent eight years believing that was enough.

Somewhere across the city, a woman is running a date range through her head and doesn't know yet whether any of it already cost her something she can't take back. I don't know it either. That's the part that keeps me standing at this window instead of in bed.

I didn't tell her. I made a calculation instead, the same kind I've made a hundred times for other people's problems and never once had to make about my own.

Arthur expects obedience. Tomorrow morning I'll give it to him, the way I've given it more times than I can count, to a man who's never once had to ask twice for it. The question isn't whether I can still fool the man who taught me how to lie. It’s whether he's already stopped believing me.

2

MEAGAN

The office looks the same. The coffee tastes the same, dark and strong, the way everything at Harrow & Associates is dark and strong and chosen by a man who believes excellence is a form of control. The lake is the same flat November steel outside the window. Laura's voice carries from the next office, professional and warm, mid-call with someone whose ego needs managing.

The woman sitting at this desk is a forgery of the woman who sat here yesterday, and so far nobody has noticed the difference.

I got back from Pilsen before the office filled, parked in the garage, walked through the lobby, nodded to the receptionist. The elevator delivered me to the same floor of the Aon Center I've occupied for five years. My office door was open. The Veridian folder sat where I'd left it, untouched.

The Oleander follow-up brief was printed and flagged on my desk as I'd queued it yesterday afternoon, and my calendar already showed a meeting with Arthur blocked for the morning, subject line: Oleander follow-up / Veridian status.

I sat down and became the version of myself that this office requires, the one with steady hands and clean analysis and a mind that runs on the rails Arthur built for it. The other version, the one who spent the better part of an hour sitting across from a man with still hands and a voice that landed low enough to feel in her sternum, stays in the car in the garage. She can wait.

The morning meeting with Arthur is about Oleander on the surface. Underneath, it’s the first time I’ve ever walked into his office actively looking for seams.

"Meagan." He rises when I enter, which he always does, a courtesy so ingrained it reads as reflex until you consider that Arthur Harrow does nothing by reflex. Everything is architecture. "How was the Oleander meeting?"

"Thomas talked for most of it about his daughter's ideas for the family office. He's proud of her in the way men are proud of daughters who remind them of themselves, which means he's also slightly threatened by her."

The corner of Arthur's mouth lifts. He settles into the leather chair behind his desk, and the November light from the corner windows catches the silver at his temples and the face of the Patek Philippe that Catherine gave him. His cufflinks today are onyx, small and precise, and his hands rest on the desk the way a conductor's hands rest before the downbeat: positioned and still.

"Sophia is sharp," Arthur says. "Sharper than Thomas gives her credit for, which she knows and resents. Use that."