CHECKMATE YOUR GRACE

Chapter Five: The Vantage Point That Shouldn't Exist

Damian moved first.

He crossed to the window in three strides, yanked the blinds shut with a force that rattled the slats, and scanned the skyline through the narrow gap before doing it the reflexive check of a man who had spent his adult life assuming someone was always watching, and had just discovered he was right.

"There's no building with a sightline into this office," Serena said, and her voice was steadier than she felt, which was, she reminded herself, the entire point of a lifetime of practice. "I checked when I moved in. I checked twice. This floor was chosen specifically because nothing overlooks it."

"Then either your check was wrong four years ago, or someone's found an angle since." Damian turned from the window, phone still dark in her hand where she hadn't been able to make herself put it down. "Or the photo wasn't taken from a building at all."

She looked up. "A drone."

"Small enough to hover outside a fourteenth-floor window without anyone on the street noticing. It's not difficult tech. My own company builds surveillance units a third that size." Something flickered across his face the specific, uncomfortable recognition of a man realizing the tools being used against him might have originated closer to home than he wanted to admit. "Which means whoever's doing this either has serious money, or access to hardware that isn't available to the general public."

"Both," Serena said quietly. "It's both, Damian. Whoever this is has been buying shares in two multi-billion-dollar companies for six weeks without leaving a traceable signature, knows a family name that fewer than a dozen people alive are supposed to know, and just took a photo through a window that isn't supposed to be photographable. That's not a rival. That's someone with resources on our level."

"Or someone who used to be on our level, and has spent years building the kind of patience that comes from losing everything once already."

She looked at him properly then really looked, past the loosened tie and the urgency that had brought him to her door, to the calculation running underneath, the same calculation she recognized in herself. "You have someone in mind."

"I have a guess. I'm not ready to say it out loud in a room I'm no longer confident is private." He held out his hand, not for her phone for her. "We need to get to your contact. Tonight, before whoever's watching decides a photo isn't enough of a message."

She hesitated exactly as long as it took to weigh the cost of trusting him against the cost of not moving fast enough, and found, for once, that the second number was larger.

"My car," she said. "Not yours. If they've been watching me, they know your vehicle by now. Mine has three decoys running the same route at any given time, and I'd rather not make it easy for them to know which one has us in it."

Something that might have been respect crossed his face. "You built decoy routes into your own commute."

"I built decoy routes into everything, Damian. It's the only reason I'm alive to have this conversation." She was already moving, pulling a coat from behind her office door, sliding the burner phone from the safe into an inner pocket instead of leaving it behind. "Welcome to how the De Luca half of my life actually operates. I hope you're not squeamish."

"I own a company that builds weapons systems for four governments. I'm not squeamish."

"Good," she said, and there was something almost like the beginning of a smile in it, gone as quickly as it had come. "Because R doesn't meet people who are."

The car unmarked, armored in ways that weren't visible from the outside, driven by a man Serena introduced only as Teo pulled out of the underground garage through a route that took four unnecessary turns before it settled onto the actual road toward the meeting point. Damian said nothing about it. He'd already clocked the countersurveillance pattern in the first ninety seconds and recognized a woman who didn't take a single unnecessary risk when she had the option not to.

It made him want her more, which he was aware was an inconvenient response to have to the situation currently unfolding.

"Tell me about R," he said, as the city lights slid past the tinted windows.

"No."

"Serena"

"You get the file tonight. You don't get the person who's kept my father's secrets safe for fifteen years, not on our first night working together, and not because I don't trust you." She glanced at him, and for once her composure had a visible crack in it, thin but real. "Because if this goes wrong if whoever's watching us decides tonight is the night they stop sending photos and start sending something worse I need at least one person left standing who knows the whole truth. And it can't be both of us."

The car went quiet. Damian understood, with a clarity that landed harder than he expected, that she'd just told him something enormous without saying it outright that some calculating, careful part of her was already planning for the possibility that this ended with one of them gone, and she'd rather it be her than let the truth die with both of them.

"That's not going to happen," he said.

"You don't know that."

"No," he agreed. "But I know that whoever's behind this wants us afraid enough to stop trusting each other before we find out what our fathers did. And I'm not interested in giving them what they want."

She didn't answer. But she also didn't look away, and in the half-dark of the car, with the city sliding past and a photograph that shouldn't exist still sitting dark on the phone in her coat pocket, that felt like its own kind of answer.

The car slowed. Teo's voice came low from the front seat. "Miss Kaine. We have a problem."

Serena leaned forward. "What kind."

"The meeting point. R's building." Teo's eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, meeting hers. "There's already a car parked outside it. Been there eleven minutes, engine running, no plates visible."

Damian's hand moved instinctively toward the inside of his jacket, toward a weapon Serena hadn't clocked him carrying until exactly that moment.

"Someone got there first," she said quietly.

"Or someone's been waiting for us the whole time," Damian said, "and the photo wasn't a warning. It was a countdown."