A Sultry Look, A Sultry Touch and Sultry Pleasures

Chicago wore its winter like a medal that year, the wind off the lake sharp enough to cut through wool, and still, on the forty-second floor of the Voss Dynamics tower, Adam Callahan Voss had the windows cracked an inch because he liked the cold on his face when he worked. Adam had never been able to think clearly in a sealed room, and a man who could not think clearly did not stay at the top of an industry for very long. He was thirty-four years old, and by every measure that mattered to the world, he had already won. Voss Dynamics manufactured the guidance systems that kept commercial satellites from falling out of the sky, and last spring it had branched into clean energy storage with a battery cell so efficient that three governments had come calling before the patent ink dried. Forbes had put him on a cover in a gray suit with his sleeves rolled, arms crossed, looking like a man who did not need the magazine nearly as much as the magazine needed him. The headline had read: THE BILLIONAIRE WHO STILL COACHES LITTLE LEAGUE. That part was true. Every Saturday from April to August, weather allowing, Adam Voss stood behind home plate at Ogden Park in a faded Cubs cap and taught nine-year-olds how to keep their eye on the ball, how to lose a game without crying about it and win one without gloating. He funded the west wing of Lurie Children's Hospital and never let his name go on the plaque. He remembered the names of the men who ran the coffee cart outside his building, their kids, their surgeries. He was, without performance, without strategy, simply liked — the rarest currency there was, rarer than the eleven billion dollars Forbes said he was worth, because you could not buy it and you could not fake it for long. People who met Adam Voss once tended to speak of him afterward the way you'd speak of weather that had been unexpectedly kind to you. "You're doing the thing again," said Priya Osei, his chief of staff, standing in the doorway with a tablet against her hip. "What thing." "The thing where you stare out the window like you're in a whiskey commercial instead of reading the Marchetti file I sent you four hours ago." She crossed the room and set the tablet down on his desk with a firmness that rattled his coffee cup. "The board wants a summary by end of day. Not a summary of your feelings about the window." Adam smiled without turning around, watching a bus crawl along Michigan Avenue forty-two floors below, tiny as a toy. "I read it in the car." "You did not read it in the car. You were on the phone with your uncle in the car. I was in the car, Adam. I was sitting three feet from you the entire ride, watching you talk about a Cubs bullpen for eleven straight minutes." "Then I read it very fast just now, in my head, using memory." "That's not a real thing people do." "It's called being efficient, Priya. You should try it." "I invented efficient," she said, deadpan, dropping into the chair across from his desk without being asked, a small rebellion six years in the making. "The Kane deal," she said, businesslike now, sliding a folder across the desk. "Marcus Kane wants the Bellweather contract, and he's not going to get it fairly. I don't know what the other way is yet. But I don't like the quiet on his side the last two weeks. Quiet from Marcus Kane is never actually quiet." "Marcus Kane," Adam said, finally turning from the window, "has been trying to bury me since I was twenty-six years old and outbid him on a parking garage neither of us actually needed. I'm not losing sleep over Marcus Kane." "You should. He doesn't fight fair, and you fight so fair it's basically a personality disorder." "It's called being a decent person, Priya, you should try it." "I'm delightful," she said, standing, gathering the tablet back up. "Ask anyone." She paused at the door, something in her posture softening. "You've got the Reyes gala tonight. Naomi's family thing, for the hospital. You remember." "I remember." It had been sitting at the edge of his mind all week rather than the center of it, crowded out by supplier contracts and a wedding six weeks away that still, some nights, made him feel like a boy standing at the edge of a lake he intended to dive into headfirst. Priya left him alone with the file he actually hadn't read, and Adam stood there another moment longer than the view deserved, thinking not about Marcus Kane or the Bellweather contract but about Naomi, about the fact that in six weeks he would stand at the front of a room and promise, in front of everyone he loved, to spend the rest of his life exactly the way he'd spent the last six years — steady, certain, chosen. If you had asked Adam Voss, on that January afternoon, to name the great danger in his life, he would not have hesitated. He would have said Marcus Kane. He would have said the Bellweather contract, or a supply chain crisis in Nevada, or the mounting cost of lithium on the international market. He would not have said a name he had never heard, one syllable, sharp as a held breath: Que. • • • Three miles south, in a loft above a shuttered print shop in the West Loop, Que Delacroix stood in front of a mirror doing the thing she always did before a job — not admiring herself, exactly, though she had every right to. She was studying herself, the way a surgeon studies an X-ray, looking for the angle that would do the most damage with the least effort, filing away which version of her face photographed as warm and which photographed as dangerous, because she would need both before the night was over. She was thirty-one. She had a face that people described, unhelpfully, as "unforgettable," which she had learned young was a compliment men gave women right before they tried to take something from them, and so she had made peace, a long time ago, with taking first. Her real name did not matter anymore. She had buried it the way you bury a body you don't want found — deep, and with intention. Que was cleaner. Que was one syllable, a held breath, a question mark without the curl. Que Delacroix ran an art consultancy out of a gallery on Superior Street that was, in fact, real — she did have an eye, she did move six-figure canvases for bored spouses of the ultra-rich. But the gallery was also a door, and behind the door was the actual business, the one that had put four million dollars into an account in Grand Cayman over the last six years, the one Marcus Kane had wired a very generous retainer into eleven days ago. The file Kane's people had sent her was thick, professionally assembled. Photographs from a dozen events, financials down to the penny, a psychological profile some overpaid consultant had written that read like a fairy tale: golden boy, beloved by all, allergic to scandal, engaged to his college sweetheart, incapable — the file actually used this word — of infidelity. Que had read that word twice and laughed out loud, alone, in her loft, the sound bouncing off exposed brick and unsold canvases, the way you laugh at a joke only you understand. Incapable. She had read that word about seven other men over eight years, in seven other files, and every single time it had turned out to mean only that no one had yet built the right room for him to walk into. She did not think of what she did as seduction, not really. Seduction implied desire, implied that the man wanted something and she simply became the shape of it. What Que did was closer to architecture. She built a version of herself precisely engineered to be the missing piece in a particular man's life — not the mistress, never the mistress, that was amateur work — but the friend who understood him, the one person in a crowded room who wasn't asking him for anything, which was the most seductive lie of all, because eventually, when she finally did ask for something, he would give it to her the way a drowning man gives up fighting the water. She had done it to a senator, who still sent flowers to the gallery every February, unaware his career had survived her only by the thinnest accident of timing. She had done it to the heir of a shipping fortune who still believed she had broken his heart by accident. She had done it, once, early, clumsily, at twenty-four, to a man whose company folded eight months later, and she had felt nothing about it at the time and had learned, slowly, that the nothing had cost her more than she'd understood. Adam Voss, though. Adam Voss was going to be the interesting one. Not because he was rich — she'd had richer. Not because he was handsome, though the photographs did him a disservice; even Kane's dossier could not fully strip the warmth out of the man's face in candid shots, the way he looked at children, at old women, at dogs on the street, an ease that could not, in Que's experience, be faked for a camera he didn't know was there. He was interesting because everyone loved him, and Que did not, as a rule, believe that men like that existed. She believed that underneath the coach's cap and the unnamed hospital wing there was a hunger like every other man had a hunger, hidden better, and she intended to find it, and feed it until it consumed him. Marcus Kane wanted the Bellweather contract and he wanted Adam Voss disgraced badly enough to lose his board's confidence in the six weeks before the vote. Que wanted something else, something she had not put in any file and never would, something she could barely admit to herself standing in front of her own mirror at six o'clock on a Tuesday evening. She wanted, once, to be right about a man like that. She picked up her phone and texted her assistant, Rosalind, three words: Get me invited. The event was a benefit gala at the Art Institute, black tie, six days out, hosted by the Reyes family — Naomi's family — in honor of the hospital wing Adam had funded and never claimed. Que had already worked out, with the cold pleasure of a chess player seeing four moves ahead, that this was the most elegant entry point. Walk into the room built on his own generosity. Let him find her there, among people who loved him, and be the one face in it he did not already know. She turned back to the mirror one last time, choosing the slate-gray dress instead of the black, because black said I know exactly what I'm doing here and gray said, more usefully, I don't know why I came. A sultry look, she thought, testing the phrase the way she tested everything, for weight, for wear. That's all it ever takes to start. She was not wrong.