On His Knees for His Enemy

Chapter 8: The Interview

The CEO's office at Cross Tower was on the forty-first floor, one level above where Victor Hale had interviewed me, and it was approximately the size of my entire apartment. The east-facing wall was floor-to-ceiling glass, overlooking the harbor. The desk was reclaimed oak from a decommissioned Norwegian freighter — a detail that, had I not known Nathaniel Cross's entire biography, I might have found romantic.

Instead, I found it an uncomfortable coincidence. My father's company had built freighters of that generation. It was not impossible that the wood beneath Nathaniel Cross's hands had once been part of a hull sailed under the Devlin house flag.

I chose not to think about that.

"Miss Kenzari."

His voice was not the voice from the museum. It was lower, slower. Stripped of the social register. The voice a man used when he was not currently performing.

"Please," he said. "Sit."

* * *

He was not behind his desk. He had taken one of the two chairs arranged near the windows, which meant he had arranged the room so that we were meeting as equals rather than as petitioner and gatekeeper. It was a power move inverted — and it was, I recognized, a test of a different kind than Victor's. Victor had been testing whether I knew the answers. Nathaniel was testing whether I understood the shape of the room.

I sat in the opposite chair without hesitation. I did not glance at the harbor. I looked at him.

He had my file open on the small table beside his chair. Not a folder — a file he had assembled himself, with additional materials clipped to the margins that had not come from my proposal. He had done his own research. He had read what I submitted and then gone looking for more. That told me two things: that he took this meeting seriously, and that he had not found everything he was looking for.

"I reviewed your profile," he said. "I have questions."

"I expected you would."

"I'll start with the Harbor Capital structure."

"Of course," I said.

* * *

He was methodical. He worked through the Harbor deal, the Sinclair engagement, two other acquisitions from my public record that most people would not have thought to find. He quoted specific numbers — not from my proposal, from his own research. His memory was precise in the way of people who have never needed to write things down because the writing slows the retrieval.

I answered everything directly. I did not oversell. I did not add context he had not asked for. I had learned, from years of sitting across tables from difficult men, that the ones who asked precise questions were best answered with precision rather than elaboration. Elaboration signaled uncertainty. Nathaniel Cross, I suspected, had been reading uncertainty for a long time.

Thirty minutes passed without either of us acknowledging it.

Then he set his file aside and shifted slightly in his chair — not restlessness, just a small recalibration — and the register of the conversation changed in a way I felt before I fully understood it.

"Wellesley College for undergraduate," he said. "Why not Harvard? You might have gotten in."

"I was on scholarship at Wellesley. I needed the scholarship."

"But Wharton MBA without a scholarship."

"I worked for a few years in between. I saved."

He looked at me. Not through me the way some men looked at women in rooms like this, as though the surface was all there was. He looked at me as though the surface was a door and he was deciding whether to knock.

"You're a hard worker, Miss Kenzari," he said.

"I'm a pragmatic one, Mr. Cross."

* * *

The room was quiet in the specific way of rooms on high floors — not silent, because the city was always breathing somewhere beneath the glass, but insulated. Set apart. The light through the harbor windows was the color of October, which in Boston was its own specific gray: not dull, but patient. Like something waiting.

"Let me change the question," he said.

A beat. I waited.

"When do you walk away from a deal?"

"When the client lies to me."

"Not when they lose money?"

"Clients lose money. That's life. What I can't work with is a client who lies, because everything I build for them is built on sand."

"What do you respect in the people across the table from you?"

"Patience."

"Elaborate."

"A person who can wait is a person who understands leverage. Everyone wants things quickly. Most of them pay for the speed. The patient ones wait, and then they pay what things are actually worth. I respect that."

He was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that I became aware of the distance between us, measured in expensive air.

"Have you ever waited for something, Miss Kenzari?"

I felt it. The hook beneath the question. It was not a small hook. It was the kind that, if you bit, you would not get loose from.

"I'm waiting now, Mr. Cross," I said. "For you to tell me whether I have a job."

The left corner of his mouth shifted — not a smile, not quite, but the muscle memory of one. It lasted less than a second.

* * *

Two hours had passed. The light through the windows had moved. I knew this because the harbor's reflection on the ceiling had changed angle, which was the kind of thing I noticed when I could not afford to look at my watch.

He closed the file.

"You're hired," he said. "Start Monday. You'll be assigned to the Harlow acquisition. Report to Victor, who reports to me. I'll want a weekly sync with you directly."

I kept my face neutral. "Understood."

"The Harlow deal is complex and time-sensitive. I expect you've already formed views on the preliminary structure."

"Several."

"Good. I'd rather have someone with too many views than someone with none."

He stood. I stood. We were nearly of a height — he had eight inches on me and I was wearing three-inch heels, which still left a significant differential, but standing felt more honest than sitting. Less like being interviewed. More like being met.

"Miss Kenzari. One more thing."

I waited.

"I do not like surprises. But I find that I like you, which means you are a surprise that I will spend time studying until you are no longer one."

The honest answer was: I don't know what to do with that. I have prepared for your suspicion. I have prepared for your cruelty. I have prepared for your indifference and your arrogance and the particular way powerful men sometimes speak to women they have not yet decided to take seriously.

I had not prepared for your curiosity.

I did not give him the honest answer.

"I look forward to that, Mr. Cross."

He extended his hand. We shook — precisely, efficiently, the duration correct to the second.

I walked out.

* * *

I rode the elevator down for the second time that week. This time I let myself look at the Rothko in the lobby. Still a fake. Still expensive. There was a lesson in that, probably, but I was too busy filing the last two hours to extract it.

On the sidewalk, I pulled out my phone and typed a text to Daniel, then deleted it before I sent it. There was nothing to tell him that was safe to tell him. Not yet. Not with two hours of Nathaniel Cross still echoing in my ear in a register I had not expected and could not quite name.

A man on the corner was selling roasted chestnuts, the first of the season. I bought a small paper bag. I did not eat them. I held the warmth in my palm and walked three blocks east, and then three blocks north, and then I got in a cab and went home.

Monday. Start Monday. The Harlow deal. Weekly syncs with the CEO.

He had said he liked me.

I had, without meaning to, said something real — about patience, about waiting, about the people who paid for things at their actual worth. I had described myself. Not Aria Kenzari, boutique M&A consultant. The other one. The one who had knelt in wet cemetery grass at twenty years old and waited five years for a door to open.

He had looked at me like a question he intended to answer.

I pressed the button to lower the cab window and let the cold air in.

Both of these things were problems. I was going to need to decide which one was the more urgent.