The conference crowd thinned out by nine.
By ten, the hotel bar had the particular quality of an industry event winding down: loosened ties, smaller clusters, the kind of conversations that only happened after the professional ones were finished and people had enough drinks to say what they actually meant. Roman had stayed without deciding to. Felix had stayed for the same unexamined reason. Somewhere between the reception and the bar, they had ended up on adjacent stools without discussing it.
Felix ordered two drinks without asking. He had known Roman long enough to know what he drank, and he was not the kind of person who wasted time on questions with obvious answers.
They sat for a while without talking. The bar had enough background noise to make silence comfortable. Neither of the
