On His Knees for His Enemy

Chapter 2: Ashford Strategic Partners

The boardroom at Ashford Strategic Partners had been designed to intimidate. Glass walls, black marble, a single Rothko on the wall behind my chair — original, not a print, which half of Boston still didn't realize about me. The effect was deliberate. When clients walked in, they experienced a specific kind of vertigo: modern enough to feel sophisticated, expensive enough to feel punished. By the time they sat down, I was already halfway to winning.

I'd learned that from my father. He had run Devlin Holdings from a walnut-paneled room that smelled like pipe smoke and sea salt. Different aesthetic, same principle.

"Miss Kenzari," the CFO of Harbor Capital was saying, across seven feet of marble, "I have to be frank with you. Your fee structure is aggressive."

I didn't blink. "Aggression is a price I charge for wasted meetings, Mr. Finley. This is your third in two weeks. You're paying for your own indecision."

He shifted in his chair. I heard his shoes drag against the floor beneath the table — a man who did not know what to do with his feet. Behind me, my two junior associates sat very still. They had learned, over the last eighteen months, not to speak in these meetings unless addressed. The client was supposed to feel the silence. The silence was a product I sold at a premium.

"You don't leave this room with an easier offer, Mr. Finley," I said. "You leave it with this one, or you leave it without me. And then, in six months, when Sinclair eats your midmarket position, I will not take your call."

He stared at me. "You're very certain of yourself, Miss Kenzari."

"No," I said, "I'm very certain of you."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he signed.

* * *

After the Harbor Capital team left, I spent thirty minutes alone in the boardroom, walking slowly around the marble table, letting my hand trail along its cold edge. This was the part of the day I had stopped sharing with anyone — the stretch of quiet after the kill, when the adrenaline started to lift and I remembered that I was a person, and that the person I was had not eaten since yesterday.

Maeve had left a note on my desk: calendar was clear until four, client files on the Sinclair follow-up needed review, and — a small postscript — I was drinking too much coffee. She had underlined the word too twice.

I crumpled the note. I considered throwing it away. I smoothed it out instead and put it in the top drawer, where I kept things I did not want to throw away and also did not want to look at.

Then I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop.

I had two monitors. The left one displayed the Harbor Capital closing package, all one hundred and forty pages now neatly executed, ready for file. The right one displayed the daily search I had not told anyone I ran — three names, cross-referenced against news alerts, SEC filings, charity rolls, and society pages.

Cross Corporation. Marcus Cross. Nathaniel Cross.

I had been running this search for two years. Most days there was nothing new. Most days I closed the window after four minutes and got back to work. Today was not most days.

The hit was near the bottom of the alerts. It was not the kind of story that made the front page of the Globe. It was a social item. A charity benefit. A list of attending patrons. A paragraph about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's autumn gala, which had become, in recent years, one of the hardest tickets in Boston to acquire.

Cross Foundation, the notice read, would be the evening's principal sponsor. The museum would unveil a newly acquired Sargent. The honorary chair would be Mrs. Elena A. Cross. Her son, Nathaniel Cross, was expected to attend.

I read it three times. Then I closed the laptop. Then I opened it again.

Saturday, the seventh of October. Eight days.

I had been waiting for a door, and the door had just arrived with a handwritten invitation I had not been sent.

* * *

"Maeve."

She appeared in my doorway with her quiet, unnerving habit of knowing exactly when I needed her. Irish, red hair gone steel grey, fifty-two and sharper than most of the men whose calendars she used to run before I poached her. She looked at me with the exhausted patience of a woman who had been waiting to see what I would do with my afternoon.

"Find me the director of the Gardner Museum," I said. "Not the staff contact. The director. Personal line if she has one."

"On it."

"And coffee."

"Espresso?"

"Double."

"Third one today."

"Did I ask for a count, Maeve?"

"No, boss." She was already gone.

Seven minutes later she put through the call. The museum director was a woman named Catherine Sullivan, who had been in her position for eleven years and who had, I already knew, three children in private school and a husband in a dying law firm. She answered on the second ring.

"Ms. Sullivan. Aria Kenzari. I'll be brief. I am new to Boston, I have developed a serious interest in being a patron of the Gardner, and I understand you have a benefit Saturday. I'd like to attend."

A beat of silence. Then, carefully: "Miss Kenzari, the event has been closed for several months. I'd love to — "

"Ms. Sullivan. Fifty thousand dollars. To the museum's general endowment. Before Friday. In exchange for one ticket to the benefit, and a polite introduction on the night of, if convenient."

Another beat. Longer.

"Fifty thousand," she repeated.

"Yes."

"That is — very generous."

"It is what the evening is worth to me."

Catherine Sullivan had been around money long enough to know when not to ask a follow-up question. "I'll have the invitation sent to your office this afternoon."

"Thank you."

I hung up.

Fifty thousand dollars was the cost of patience I had run out of.

* * *

That night, I stood in my closet in a bathrobe and made a decision.

The dress had to be right. Not provocative — provocative was the language of women who wanted to be wanted, and I was not in the business of being wanted. I was in the business of being noticed in the exact way I intended. I wanted to be seen as an investment. A curiosity. A specific and expensive object that did not announce its price.

I ran my fingers along the hangers. Black — too predictable. Navy — too corporate. Burgundy — too much appetite. My hand stopped on the emerald. I had owned the dress for two years. I had never worn it.

Silk. Knee length. A neckline that covered everything but suggested the shape of it anyway. The color of old stained glass in the windows of churches I no longer visited.

I pulled it off the hanger. I held it against my body and looked at myself in the mirror.

The woman who looked back was not quite Aria and not quite Ariana. She was someone else — someone who had spent five years being built, piece by piece, in the quiet rooms of hotels in Seoul and Philadelphia and Hong Kong, from parts she had paid for in cash and in sleep and in the slow, deliberate murder of her own former face.

My mother had worn emerald once. Gala at the Four Seasons, the summer before her last chemotherapy. She had stood beside my father in a photograph I had kept in my wallet for years, and she had looked — in a way that I had not understood, at fourteen — like a woman who already knew how short her life was going to be, and was determined to wear a color she loved while she could.

I pushed the memory down.

I laid the dress on the bed and stepped back. Emerald, in the right light, could look black. In the wrong light, it could look like grief.

I would wear it to the Gardner Museum benefit in eight days. I would stand three feet from Nathaniel Cross and let him look at me for the first time. He would not know me. He would not know what was coming. He would only know that a consultant from a boutique M&A firm had donated a large sum to a charity he sponsored, and that she had a very direct way of holding a stem of champagne.

I zipped the garment bag closed. "Eight days," I said to no one.

And then, very quietly, I laughed. Just once. It was the first time I had laughed since I'd landed.