The summons was not a request. The two men in dark suits escorted Xavier to the black town car idling at the curb, holding the door open with the sterile politeness of prison guards. Isabella watched from the granite steps of the Aethelred building, the cold seeping through her borrowed coat. He didn’t look back. He slid inside, the grey metal box a stark silhouette on his lap, and the car pulled smoothly into traffic, swallowing him whole.
She was alone.
The hours that followed were a slow-motion panic. She returned to the hotel, to her basement desk, moving through her menial tasks like an automaton. Every buzz of the office phone, every footstep in the corridor, felt like the precursor to a different kind of escort—security arriving to march her out for her role in the morning’s trans
