A Sultry Look, A Sultry Touch and Sultry Pleasures

Table Nineteen, Revisited

Marcus Kane's office occupied the top three floors of a glass tower on Wacker Drive that had been designed, quite deliberately, to be four feet taller than the Voss Dynamics building six blocks north, a fact Kane brought up so often that his own architects had started rolling their eyes about it in meetings he wasn't in, and a fact that his assistant had, at one point, quietly suggested he stop mentioning to new clients, advice he had not taken.

He was sixty-one, silver-haired, handsome in the manner of a man who had spent considerable money ensuring it, veneers and a standing Tuesday appointment with a dermatologist he paid an obscene retainer to keep on call, and he had built Kane Aerospace from a single defense subcontract into a nineteen-billion-dollar company through a combination of genuine engineering talent and a willingness to do things that men like Adam Voss found, in Kane's private and frequently voiced opinion, precious.

"Tell me you have something," he said to Que, who sat across the glass desk from him with her legs crossed and her expression giving away exactly nothing, which was one of the things Kane paid her so well for, one of the reasons he'd used her over any of his other contractors for three assignments running.

"I have an opening," Que said. "I don't have leverage yet. Those aren't the same thing, and if you rush this, you'll get neither, and you'll have burned five months of positioning for nothing."

"Bellweather votes in five weeks."

"I'm aware of the timeline, Marcus. I set the timeline. I'm the one who has to actually be in the room with him, not you, and I'm telling you as someone who's read every line of the file your team put together, he's not a man you rush." She let a beat of silence sit, cool and deliberate, the way she let everything sit, watching him across the glass. "He talked to me about his dead mother on our second real conversation. Do you understand what that means? That's not a man who falls into bed with strangers. That's a man who has to be courted, slowly, or the whole thing collapses and he goes running back to his fiancée with a guilty conscience and nothing to hide, and then you've spent a great deal of money and I've spent a great deal of time for absolutely nothing, and you'll have tipped your hand for nothing besides."

Kane studied her the way he studied everyone, for the tell that would let him win the conversation, and found, as he always found with Que, nothing at all, not a flicker, not a hesitation. It was, if he was honest with himself, part of why he trusted her with this and no one else — she was the only person in his employ who had never once flinched under his particular brand of pressure, and he had learned, expensively, over the years, that people who didn't flinch were usually hiding something worse than fear, though he had never once bothered to ask himself what, exactly, Que Delacroix might be hiding, having always assumed the answer was simply more of the same cold competence she showed him.

"Five weeks," he said again, standing, walking to the window with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the gray river far below. "And Que — I don't need to remind you what happens if this drags into a sixth."

He didn't need to remind her. That was the whole architecture of their arrangement, unspoken and total: eight years ago, when Que had been twenty-three and desperate and complicit, at the ragged edge of a life that had already cost her everything once, in a fraud that had ruined an elderly widow out of her retirement, Marcus Kane had been the man who made the evidence disappear — quietly, completely, for a price that had never once, in eight years, stopped accruing interest. She did not work for him because he paid well, though he did. She worked for him because he owned, in a locked drawer somewhere in this glass tower, the one thing that could end the entire careful architecture of the life she'd rebuilt since, could take everything she had spent nearly a decade constructing and reduce it, in a single phone call to the right prosecutor, to nothing at all.

"I understand the timeline," Que said, standing, smoothing her skirt, giving him nothing else, her face as composed as it had been the day she'd walked into this office for the first time, eight years and a lifetime ago. "You'll have your leverage before the vote, Marcus. I've never missed."

"No," Kane agreed, watching her go, something almost fond in his expression, the fondness of a man for a tool that had never once failed him, "you haven't."

But he did not know, and would not have believed if told, that as Que rode the elevator down sixty floors and out into the gray Chicago afternoon, the doors sliding shut on the polished lobby behind her, she was thinking not about leverage, not about the vote, but about a hallway full of taped-off squares where paintings would eventually hang, and a man who had said somebody give this kid a lake about himself without meaning to, unguarded and unaware that anyone was cataloguing the moment, and how badly, for the first time in eight years of doing exactly this, she wanted the job to take longer than it needed to.