THE DEVIL’S DEVOTION

Due Dilligence

Dante Moretti had a rule about Fridays, which was that nothing new started on them, and he broke it at 6:40 that evening by asking Marcus to pull the full file on a woman he had known for twenty-three minutes.

"The assistant," Marcus said, not quite a question, standing in the doorway of Dante's office with his jacket already over one arm and the specific weariness of a man who had hoped to be home by seven. "You want the folder HR already sent, or—" "The other one."

Marcus didn't move for a second. Behind him, the city had gone the color it went most evenings this time of year, glass and steel catching the last of the light and throwing it back gold, and Dante watched it without really seeing it, the way he watched most things that weren't in front of him demanding a decision.

"That's not standard for an EA hire," Marcus said. "I'm aware of what's standard." "You want a full background pull on someone who's going to be booking your dentist appointments."

"I want to know who I'm letting into the building," Dante said, and heard, distantly, how that sounded — reasonable, procedural, the kind of sentence a careful man says about a decision he has already made for reasons he hasn't examined. He didn't examine it now either. "Twenty minutes, Marcus. I'll wait."

Marcus looked at him a moment longer than the request required — the look of a man doing arithmetic he'd rather not finish out loud — and then set his jacket back down over the chair by the door. "Twenty minutes," he said. "Then I'm going home to a wife who's forgotten what I look like."

It took closer to forty, which Dante used to finish two calls he didn't need to make himself and to stand at the window doing nothing at all, which was rarer for him than either call. The tower below him thinned out floor by floor as the evening emptied it — he could track it, if he wanted to, by which lights went dark and in what order, a habit from his twenties that had never quite left him, the compulsion to know the shape of a system even when no one had asked him to.

When Marcus came back, he set the folder on the desk without sitting down, which Dante understood as its own kind of statement.

"Evelyn Grace Hart," Marcus said, reciting it the way he recited things he already privately had opinions about and intended to keep to himself unless pushed. "Twenty-six. State school, communications and business, worked three jobs to pay for it, graduated with honors anyway. No criminal record, not even a parking ticket, which honestly is its own kind of red flag in this city.

Five years at Ashcombe Whitmore before this, worked her way from a floor assistant to EA for their head of client relations. Left with a strong reference and no severance dispute, which — again — unusual. People don't leave clean like that unless they were either miserable and hiding it well or genuinely good at their job." "Which is it?"

"Good at her job, from what I can tell. Her old boss called her 'the only honest person in that building' when we called for a reference, and he did not sound like a man who liked giving compliments." Marcus flipped a page he'd clearly already memorized. "Mother's a bookkeeper, small operation, one employee — herself. Father's not in the picture, hasn't been since Evelyn was nine. She's got a younger brother, Sam, twenty-two, still finishing his degree. She sends money home most months. Not required to. Does it anyway."

Dante didn't say anything. He was looking at the photograph clipped to the front of the file — her interview badge photo, taken that morning, the kind of picture that flattered no one, and in it she looked exactly as she had in the room: unimpressed with the process of being photographed, which was not the same thing as unimpressive.

"There's a boyfriend," Marcus said, in the deliberately flat tone he used when he suspected a piece of information mattered to Dante more than Dante would admit and had decided to make him ask for it directly rather than offer it up easily. "Two years. Daniel Foster. Insurance underwriter. Nothing interesting there. No debt beyond student loans, current on all of it. Credit's clean.

She's never been sued, never sued anyone, no liens, nothing flagged on any watchlist you'd care about." He closed the folder. "In short: she is, near as I can tell in forty minutes, exactly who she appears to be. Which, again, I'll remind you, is more digging than we've done on an assistant since—"

He stopped himself. It was a small thing, the kind of pause most people wouldn't have registered as a pause at all, but Dante had spent twelve years learning the specific shape of Marcus Reyes choosing his words, and he heard the door close on the sentence before it opened.

"Since when," Dante said. Not really a question. A door of his own, held very slightly ajar. "Since nothing." Marcus picked his jacket back up. "Since you started running full workups on people who make your coffee." "She won't be making my coffee. That's not the job."

"No," Marcus agreed, with the particular dryness he permitted himself only after hours, when the title between them thinned out into something closer to twenty years of actually knowing each other. "The job is closer, isn't it? Your calendar. Your calls. Your travel. The parts of your life that used to have a revolving door on them before I could get the names memorized." He said it lightly. It didn't land lightly. "How many was it, in three years? Four?" "That's not a fair count."

"Six, Dante. Six executive assistants in three years, and every single one of them requested reassignment within four months, and every single time you told me it was performance, and I stopped believing you were around assistant number four." Marcus said it without heat, which was somehow worse than if he'd said it angry. "You want to tell me what actually happened to Naomi Cortez?

Because her exit paperwork says 'mutual,' and I wrote that paperwork, and it wasn't mutual, it was a woman who came into my office and asked me, very calmly, whether it was normal for the Chairman to know the name of her therapist."

Dante turned his watch on his wrist — a habit he was not aware he had until the day Marcus, years ago, in a moment of rare candor over too much wine, had told him he did it whenever a conversation went somewhere he'd rather it didn't. He stopped himself doing it now, deliberately, and found that stopping was its own kind of tell.

"I like to understand the people around me," he said. "That's not a crime."

"It's not a crime. It's also not what you did with Naomi Cortez, or with the one before her, or the one before that, and we both know it, so let's not do the part where you make me spell it out at seven o'clock on a Friday." Marcus's voice had gone quieter, which was how Dante knew he meant it. "I'm not telling you not to hire her. Her file's clean, she's sharp, she handled a genuinely unhinged morning downstairs better than half the executives on this floor would have.

Hire her. But do me a favor and don't repeat last time. I like this one's chances of staying past Christmas." "I don't know what you think last time was." "I think you know exactly what I think it was," Marcus said, and picked up his jacket for good this time, "and I think that's why you're not arguing with me about it, you're just changing the subject in that very controlled voice you use when a conversation's gone somewhere you don't want it to go."

He paused at the door, and for a moment something moved behind his usual composure — not quite fear, but its careful cousin, the specific discomfort of a man standing near a door he had been asked, a long time ago, never to open. "Have a good weekend, Dante." "You too."

The door closed. The office went quiet in the particular way it went quiet after Marcus left it — not empty, exactly, because Dante had never once in twelve years found this room genuinely empty, but quiet in the way of a held breath.

He sat for a while without doing anything at all, which was unlike him, and then he opened the second drawer of his desk, the one that stuck slightly in humid weather and had never been fixed because fixing it would have meant letting a maintenance crew look inside it, and took out the folder Marcus had brought him, and read it again, more slowly this time, the way a man reads something he already knows by heart, looking for the sentence he missed the first time.

*Mother's a bookkeeper. Sends money home most months. Not required to. Does it anyway?*

He didn't know why that particular line was the one that stayed with him. He told himself it was the kind of detail that mattered for the job — loyalty, responsibility, the sort of person who showed up even when no one was checking. He told himself several other things too, in the following minutes, each of them reasonable, each of them true as far as it went, and none of them touching the actual shape of what he'd felt sitting across from her that morning, which he had no immediate intention of examining and therefore did not.

He closed the folder. He turned it face-down on the desk, an old habit, precise and unthinking, the same motion he used for anything he wasn't ready to look at directly. And it was that motion — the flat of his hand pressing paper face-down against wood — that made him glance, without meaning to, at the drawer beneath it. The one that stuck.He opened it another inch. Just enough.

The frame inside lay exactly as he'd left it the last time he'd looked, which he did not let himself remember the date of. Face-down, the way he kept it, the way he kept most things that had a face attached to a name he did not say, even to himself, even in the privacy of an empty office on a Friday evening with the city going dark floor by floor below him.He did not turn it over.

He closed the drawer instead — not quickly, nothing about Dante Moretti was ever quick, but with a finality that in another man might have looked like flinching — and sat for a long moment with his hand still resting on the wood, listening to a building emptying itself around him, one light at a time.

Monday, he thought. Monday she would start, and the office would have a new voice in it, and he would find out, the way he found out everything eventually, whether this one lasted longer than the others.

He told himself that was the only question he was actually asking.