Page 17 of Under Her Protection

The man came back. He whispered to Beaumont. Beaumont's jaw moved again.

"Madame confirms."

"Of course she does."

"This way, please."

He led. Leo followed him up the stone steps, across the checkerboard marble of the entry hall, past a pair of eighteenth-century console tables and a Vigée Le Brun that had no business being in a private home and was in a private home anyway. The air inside the residence smelled faintly of wax and beeswax and, under both, something cold and tailored. Vetiver. Very small. Vivienne Strauss's scent, she understood without being told, because it was the only note in a house so otherwise neutral that it had to be the principal's.

Beaumont stopped at a pair of double doors.

"The library."

He opened them.

Leo stepped in.

The library was a long room with tall windows at the far end giving onto the garden, oxblood leather chairs, floor to three-quarter shelving in dark walnut. The light was grey and good. Books to the ceiling. Two lamps lit though it was only just after two. A small round table between two chairs on the left, a coffee service on it, untouched.

Vivienne Strauss was at the window.

She did not turn when Leo came in. That was the first thing, and Leo registered it and did not take it as an insult, which was possibly not what it had been intended as. She stood with her back to the room, one hand at her side, the other loose against the frame of the window. Leo understood, after a beat, that she was going to turn in her own time. Dark hair swept up. A grey dress, knee-length, severely cut. No jewelry Leo could see from this angle except the signet ring on her right hand.

Leo did not announce herself. She took five steps into the room and then stopped where she could see the door, the window, and the principal all without turning her head.

"Mademoiselle Cole." Vivienne spoke to the window.

"Madame Strauss."

"You may sit."

"Thank you. I will stand."

Vivienne turned.

Three years of memory had not prepared her. Grey-blue eyes, exactly as advertised. A face that did not volunteer anything. Tall, in heels, which made the height difference between them close to nothing. The stillness Leo had noted at a distance was a different object up close. Up close, it had weight.

Vivienne's eyes crossed her once, slowly. It went through her exactly as a thumb pressed to a bruise she had not known she had.

"You are late,” Vivienne said.

"I am on time."

"I said two."

"I arrived at thirteen-fifty-eight and cleared your street before I pressed the buzzer. I was at your door at fourteen hundred."

"Mm."

Vivienne walked to the chair by the table, unhurried, and sat. She folded her hands in her lap. She did not gesture for Leo to sit again, because Leo had declined; Leo's declining to sit was now a fixed object in the room, and Vivienne, Leo registered, was a woman who did not waste a gesture.

"Tell me," Vivienne said, in English, "what you intend to do in my house."

"Assess. Reconfigure. Restrict."

"In what order."

"That order."