Caught Between Ice and Fire

Chapter 4 What His Name Actually Was

I slept badly.

Not because I was upset — or not only because of that. It was more the specific discomfort of realising you'd been operating on wrong information and having no idea how far back the wrong information went. Like walking into a room and finding out the floor plan was different from what you'd been shown. Everything still standing. Nothing where you thought it was.

I lay in the dark and replayed the meeting from that morning.

The way he'd said: I did. When I'd reminded him he'd called the community centre concept his favourite. He'd known I was referencing the interview. He'd known he hadn't been at the interview. And he'd said I did anyway, without a flicker, without a stumble, because he was the kind of man for whom lying came as naturally as breathing and probably felt about as morally significant.

I replayed the way he'd taken notes on the timeline extension. The deliberate quality of the silence when I pushed back. The way he'd turned at the corridor entrance and asked about the west wall as if he had every right to know what was inside my head.

He'd been assessing me. Marcus had said so — it was a thing he did. And I had sat across from him and thought he seemed different today, a little colder, and I'd chalked it up to him being busy, or tired, or simply not in the mood for warmth.

I hadn't considered, not for a single second, that I was talking to a completely different person.

That bothered me more than the deception itself. That I hadn't known.

I was still thinking about it when my alarm went off at six-fifteen.

* * *

I arrived at eight twenty-five the next morning.

Five minutes earlier than yesterday, which was entirely coincidental and had nothing to do with anything.

I signed in. I rode the elevator. I walked past the forty-third floor reception with what I hoped was the expression of someone who had slept perfectly well and had absolutely no unresolved feelings about anything. I went to my desk on forty-one, set down my bag, opened my laptop, and spent forty minutes doing completely normal work things.

Then I picked up my notebook, took the stairs to forty-three, walked down the hall, and knocked on the door at the end.

"Come in."

He was at the desk this time. Reading something — actual paper, which surprised me, though I wasn't sure why. He looked up when I entered, and that same cool assessment moved across his face, quick and practiced.

"Ms. Wells." No surprise in his voice. No particular anything. "I don't have you scheduled until Thursday."

"I know." I closed the door behind me and crossed the room and sat down in the chair across from his desk without being invited to. I watched his eyes track the movement — the slight recalibration, the same fractional shift I was beginning to recognise. "I have a question."

"Ask it."

"Why didn't you tell me who you were?"

The room was very quiet. Outside, forty-three floors below us, Velmoor City was going about its Tuesday morning with complete indifference to whatever was happening in this office. A muscle in Roman Kade's jaw moved, almost imperceptibly.

"I introduced myself as Mr. Kade," he said.

"You introduced yourself as the man I'd interviewed with," I said. "You referenced things from that interview. Specific things — the community centre, the part about pushing back. You knew I'd assume you were Ethan."

"I didn't correct the assumption," he said. "That's not the same as making it."

I looked at him steadily. "That's a very fine line."

"Most useful lines are."

I leaned forward slightly in my chair. Not aggressively — I wasn't angry, exactly, or I was, but anger wasn't the point. The point was that I needed to understand the rules of this place, and specifically the rules of this man, before I spent the next however-many months working in his building and possibly being assessed without my knowledge every other Tuesday.

"Here's my problem," I said. "I can work with difficult. I can work with demanding. I can work with someone who doesn't smile and doesn't do small talk and thinks the best way to evaluate a person is to watch them when they don't know they're being watched." I paused. "What I can't work with is not knowing where I stand. So I need to know — right now, today — are you going to keep pretending to be your brother, or can we start over with you being whoever you actually are?"

Something happened to his expression.

I'd seen him go still before — that controlled, wall-like stillness that I was starting to think was his default setting. But this was different. This was the stillness of something that had been surprised into stopping. Like a clock that had been ticking steadily and then, without warning, skipped a beat.

It lasted maybe two seconds.

Then Roman Kade set down the papers he was holding, folded his hands on the desk, and looked at me with something I hadn't seen from him before. Not warmth — I didn't think warmth was in his vocabulary, not the easy, accessible kind. But something. A quality of attention that felt different from the assessment. More direct. Less calculated.

"Roman," he said.

I blinked. "Sorry?"

"My name. You asked who I actually was." The faintest movement at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, the structural suggestion that a smile was theoretically possible in that face. "Roman Kade. Not Ethan."

Something loosened in my chest. Just slightly.

"Roman," I said.

"Yes."

"And Ethan is in Singapore."

"Until the end of the month, at least."

"And you're running the project in his place."

"I've been running this project since the foundation was poured," he said, and there was something in his voice when he said it — something that wasn't quite pride but was in the same neighbourhood. The quiet ownership of someone who had built something real and didn't particularly need anyone to acknowledge it. "Ethan is the face. I'm the structure."

I thought about Marcus saying: the engineering, the innovation — that's Roman's vision, even if Ethan's name is on the press releases.

"Okay," I said.

He looked at me. "That's it?"

"What else do you want me to say?"

"Most people," he said, "would have more to say about it."

"I'm not most people." I picked up my notebook. "I came here to work on a building. I don't particularly care whose name is on the press release as long as the person making decisions knows what they're doing." I met his eyes. "Do you know what you're doing?"

Another beat of that clock-skipping silence.

"Yes," he said.

"Then we're fine." I stood. "I'll see you Thursday, as scheduled."

I was almost at the door when he spoke again.

"The bronze panels."

I stopped. Turned.

He was still behind the desk, still with that quality of absolute stillness that I was starting to think wasn't coldness at all but something more like — concentration. The way very still water wasn't empty. It was just deep.

"I looked them up," he said.

I waited.

"Hammered finish, raw texture, vertical installation. There are three fabricators in the country who can do it at the scale you're describing." He held my gaze. "I called two of them this morning."

I stared at him.

I had mentioned the idea once. Offhand, at eight o'clock at night, in an empty office, to a man I thought wasn't really listening. And he had gone home — or wherever Roman Kade went at the end of the day — and looked it up, and then called fabricators before nine in the morning.

"It's still just an idea," I said. "It hasn't been through any kind of approval process. Marcus hasn't even seen the sketches yet."

"I know." He looked back down at his papers, and just like that, the moment was over — he was back behind the wall, unhurried and unreachable. "I thought it was worth knowing if it was possible. That's all."

I stood in the doorway for a second longer than was strictly necessary.

Then I said, "It's possible," and left.

* * *

I didn't tell Marcus about the conversation.

I told myself it was because there was nothing to tell — I'd gone, I'd asked, I'd got an answer, and now we were all operating with accurate information. That was all. A small administrative correction. Nothing significant.

What I didn't examine too closely was the feeling I'd had walking out of that office. The odd, slightly electric quality of it, like the air after a storm when everything smells different and you're not sure yet if it's better or worse, just unmistakably changed.

I didn't examine it because I was professional, and I was focused, and I had a lobby design to develop and a five-week deadline that was already ticking.

And because Roman Kade was my employer — or close enough as made no difference.

And because the last thing I needed, with my mother's treatment and Kofi's school fees and the landlord's unanswered voicemails, was to have any feeling whatsoever about the man at the top of the building.

I sat at my desk and I opened my sketchbook and I drew until the feeling went away.

It almost worked.