Page 59 of Under Her Protection

"Tell me it is a bad idea."

"It is certainly a bad idea."

Vivienne nodded. She knew it. But she couldn’t help it.

“And I want all of the rest of the details on Friday over the Armagnac you are going to let me order."

"Fine."

They sat for a breath.

Isabella turned the glass once on its base.

"Now," she said. "Tell me who has hit your company this hard that it seemed a good idea to have your bodyguard fuck you.”

Vivienne looked at her.

"Lara Kossek."

"Who?”

“She’s an old — " Vivienne permitted herself half a second to choose the word, and chose it, "an old attachment."

“A lover?” Isabella nodded knowingly. “I do not know this name."

"No. It was a long time ago. Before you and I. Before most of what I am."

"How long?”

"Twenty-five years."

"And she is doing what?”

"She is taking my company apart piece by piece from the outside. The Bellini acquisition. The June memo. Tomorrow, I am told by the Blackthorn flowchart, it will be a service contract in Milan. She has spent twenty-five years preparing this and she has put the pieces down well. The bodyguard is here because Lara, in what I assume is the same week, has decided to put a warning shot into the air."

"Warning shot."

"Not literal. Rhetorical. A message on my private channel at Maison Noire ten days ago. It has been a very long time, she said."

"What did you do when she and you ended it?”

"I did not end it well. I chose the empire. She asked for a version of me that would put her above the empire, and I did not have that version to give her, and I told her so in a letter I regret to this day, and she did not reply to the letter, and she became Dr. Kossek, and I became the woman sitting in front of you. The rest is a matter of the intervening twenty-five years."

"I see."

"Mm."

"And she is not, you think, going to stop at a June memo."

"No."

"What is your instinct?”

"That she is going to go personal. That the company is the ground she is working on, but the target is me. That she is going to try to show the world I am a woman who can be broken, because she believes, after twenty-five years of thinking about it, that she can break me.”

"Can she?”

"Isabella."