Chapter 2 — Dinner with the Devil (1)

Evelyn reported the swapped relic in three words: I'll handle it.

Her desk at Lumin & Co. got a perfectly ordinary email about a delayed quarterly report. Her grandmother got a perfectly polite note saying the investigation was progressing. The council got nothing. Evelyn had learned long ago that the less powerful people knew about your next move, the more of it you got to keep.

Handling it was very much her style. The next evening she walked back into the Well complaining that a buyer had every right to demand a face-to-face refund on a fake, and she did not have an appointment.

Nobody tried to stop her. The fanged guard saw her coming and actually stepped aside, with a smile that knew something she didn't.

"He's been expecting you," he said.

Evelyn's steps slowed. She had made no appointment.

She had, in fact, done everything she could think of to make sure no one expected her. She had paid cash for the laundromat entry. She had used a different alias. She had walked three blocks in the rain before descending, on the off chance she was followed.

None of it mattered. He had been waiting.

That was the second thing that bothered her. The first was that she had come back at all. A rational operator would have walked out, reported to the council, and let the extermination order do its work. A rational operator would not have spent the whole day turning over the image of a chandelier held up by shadow.

She told herself she was gathering evidence. It was a lie she told with a straight face, and she told it well.

Kaelen Varga waited in a private dining room on the top floor. The room looked like an opera house that had been kidnapped and moved: crystal chandeliers, a scarlet carpet, and a gramophone older than her grandmother, currently playing Adrien Vale like it had all the time in the world. The hellhound lay beside the table wearing a pink bow around its neck.

No other servants. No guards at the door. Whatever else the Well was, it was a place where its monarch did not need guards in his own dining room. Evelyn filed that away as a fact about power. The most powerful people in any room were the ones who had stopped hiring witnesses.

"The dog's name is Mr. Fluffy," Kaelen said. "Fourteen billion years of bloodline. He likes the bow. Names and bloodlines are not the same thing, Miss Ashworth — or should I say, Miss Sterling?"

The room went quiet for a heartbeat.

Evelyn neither confirmed nor denied. She pulled out the chair across from him and sat with the posture of a woman joining a board meeting. "So. You invite a woman who won't even give you her real name to dinner. Why?"

"Tonight's menu is raw beef." He cut into his steak, gray eyes amused. "I have to know whether the woman across from me is a guest or the prey."

"Then you'll be disappointed." Evelyn picked up her own knife and fork. "I'm the hunter."

"Is that so."

"It is. Hunters eat. Prey doesn't usually get a choice of table."

He laughed, low and genuine, and gestured at the plate. "Then eat. A hunter needs her strength. The night is young and the room is very old."

They looked at each other. There was no sword fight, no open sneer, only the clean click of silver on porcelain and Adrien Vale spilling out of a brass horn older than America. Danger moved through that dinner without making a sound, like water under ice.

If you ignored the distance between their fingertips.

She ate because she was actually hungry, and because refusing his food would have been a declaration, and she was not ready to declare anything. The steak was better than it had any right to be. She said so. He looked pleased, as if she had complimented his wine cellar.

"You're not what I expected," she said.

"And what did you expect?"

"Monsters. I expected a monster."

"I'll have you know I'm very good at being a monster. I just reserve it for paying customers." He turned his glass in his fingers. "What did you expect the monster to look like?"

"Louder. Worse at dinner."

"It's a common complaint. I'm terrifyingly well-mannered."

"Did you just compliment yourself while threatening me?"

"I do both at once. It saves time." He poured more wine. The bottle, she noted, was older than the country. "Tell me about Lumin and Co. Do you actually enjoy trading, or is it just the best cover you could find?"

"It's both." She turned the glass in her fingers. "The markets are honest. They only want your money. People want your money and your soul and they smile while they take both."

"A woman after my own cold heart."

"You don't have a cold heart. You have a well-maintained one. There's a difference."

He laughed at that, a real one, and she filed it away. Kaelen Varga laughed the way dangerous men laughed when they were not performing: briefly, surprised, as if he had forgotten the sound existed.

She reached for the salt. He reached for the salt. Two sets of fingertips met over the shaker for less than a second.

The candles on the table shot up half a meter in a blue-white flare. Mr. Fluffy yelped, his fur standing straight on end, and bolted under the table. A seam split in the ceiling and dust sifted down onto the steak.

"Manhattan's old buildings," Evelyn said.

"Very old," Kaelen said. "About a thousand years old."

Under the table, Mr. Fluffy peeked one eye out, decided the ceiling had stopped falling, and crept back to his cushion with wounded dignity.

He pulled his hand back and went on cutting his meat as if nothing had happened. Only the tendons on his knife hand had gone tight. Evelyn did not reach for the salt again. She had never needed salt anyway.

"Your dog," she said, because silence was worse.

"Mr. Fluffy is a coward. He's also a strategic genius. He beat me at chess last Tuesday. I have not recovered."

"A hellhound with a pink bow."

"Don't let the bow fool you. He could level a city block. He chooses not to. He chooses bones."

"Your court runs on bones and Adrien Vale."

"My court runs on whatever keeps the peace. The peace is overrated, but the alternatives are worse." He watched her across the table. "You're wondering why I don't just kill you. A woman with your face in my basement, asking about my books. Most monarchs would have. Most monarchs did, historically."

"And why don't you?"

"Because you walked in here alone." He said it simply. "That either makes you the bravest person I've met in a thousand years, or the most foolhardy. I find I'm curious which."

"I'd put my money on foolhardy."

"Then we agree." He raised his glass. "A table where two people agree to be honest about how much they're lying. Progress."