The red wax seal pressed into Eleanor Ashworth's vision before she had properly opened her eyes.
She sat upright in bed, the linen sheets tangled around her waist, her heart striking against her ribs with the particular rhythm of remembered terror. Her brother's face, slack and emptied of everything that had made him Edmund, lingered behind her eyelids like an afterimage of lightning. The dream had come again. It always came the same way, beginning with Edmund laughing at some private joke, and ending with his blood on Eleanor's hands, warm and impossibly red, seeping between her fingers no matter how tightly she pressed them together.
The clock on her nightstand read half past three. London slept beyond the heavy curtains of her bedroom, a city of muffled traffic and distant sirens, but Eleanor was awake now, and she would not find sleep again until dawn. She rarely did, on the nights the dream visited.
She pressed the heel of her palm against her sternum. The phantom warmth of Edmund's blood faded, as it always did, replaced by the colder truth of seven years and a headstone in Highgate Cemetery. Edmund Whitfield, beloved son, beloved brother. Murdered, unsolved. The Metropolitan Police had closed the case in '08, citing insufficient evidence. Eleanor had never accepted the closing, but she had accepted, eventually, that the truth would not come to her through proper channels.
That acceptance had been a kind of death in itself.
She swung her legs from the bed, her bare feet finding the cool floorboards with a small shock of contact. The house was silent, the way old money houses were silent at this hour, with only the faint settling of timbers and the distant hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen below. Her son Geoffrey slept down the hall, his door ajar as he preferred it. Lily, her daughter, was away at school for the term. The house held its breath around Eleanor as she rose.
She took one step toward the bathroom.
And stopped.
On the floor, just inside her bedroom door, lay an envelope.
Eleanor had not left any envelope there. She was meticulous, almost pathologically so, about the order of her own rooms, particularly the bedroom, which she treated as a kind of inner sanctum. No one entered without knocking. No one entered at all, most nights, except for Mrs. Dalton, who came twice weekly and was not permitted past the threshold of the master suite.
The envelope lay against the pale wood floor with the deliberate placement of a card on a gaming table. It was rectangular, slightly larger than a standard letter envelope, and it was the color of arterial blood.
Eleanor did not move for a long moment. Her heart had resumed its quickened rhythm, and she could feel the blood thinning in her face, a faint coolness at her temples that she had learned to associate with the approach of something not quite real. She had learned, over seven years of solitary grieving and solitary investigating, that the world occasionally offered her signs, and that the signs were never to be trusted, and that she must look at them anyway.
She crossed the room. The floorboards complained softly beneath her feet, the old wood registering her weight with small creaks of recognition. The envelope was heavier than it appeared. When she bent to pick it up, she found it sealed with black wax, impressed with a symbol she did not recognize. Not a family crest. Not a monogram. Something older, geometric, almost architectural in its precision. A hexagon within a circle, or perhaps a hexagon enclosing a circle, the two shapes bound by lines she could not quite trace in the dim light.
The paper itself was thick, fibrous, almost coarse to the touch. It smelled faintly of something she could not immediately place. Not ink. Not perfume. Something older, drier, with a faintly metallic undertone, like the air in a bank vault, or the air in a chapel after the candles had been extinguished.
She broke the seal. The wax crumbled in her fingers, black dust against her skin. Inside was a single card, heavy stock, the same blood-red color as the envelope, and the card bore an inscription in black ink, the letters pressed deep into the paper with a steady, even hand.
The Ashworth Salon
requests the honour of your presence
at a private gala
to be held on the nineteenth of October
at eleven of the clock, post meridiem
at the Voss Collection, Hanover Square
Black tie. Discretion expected. Attendance by card only.
Eleanor read the card twice. Then a third time, though she had committed the words to memory by the second reading. The Voss Collection. She knew the name. It had crossed her desk in the past year, attached to a donation request from one of the smaller auction houses. Sebastian Voss, the new owner of a private gallery that had previously specialized in antiquarian maps. The rebrand had been sudden. The gallery's focus had shifted, according to the trade press, to something the journalists could only describe as unusual acquisitions.
Eleanor had not paid much attention. There had been no reason to.
The card sat in her hand like a small, unexploded thing. She turned it over. On the back, in the same steady hand, a single additional line.
Your brother sends his regards.
The card fell from her fingers. It landed faceup on the floor, the black ink catching the faint light from the window, and Eleanor stood very still for several heartbeats, her bare feet cold against the wood, her nightgown thin at her shoulders.
She thought, with the clinical detachment that had preserved her sanity through seven years of grief, that this was either a coincidence of cruelty, a message from someone who knew her history, or something else entirely. Something that did not fit inside the word coincidence.
She did not pick the card up again. Not yet.
Instead, she crossed to the door of Geoffrey's room. It was ajar, as always. She pushed it open gently, letting her eyes adjust to the deeper dark. The curtains were not fully drawn, and a sliver of streetlight fell across the foot of the bed, illuminating the small chaos of a boy's life: a football sock on the floor, a glass of water half-drunk on the nightstand, a library book splayed open and abandoned mid-chapter. Geoffrey himself lay on his side, one hand curled beneath his pillow, his breathing slow and even.
She watched him for a moment. Eleven years old. Her son. The boy who had her brother's curiosity and her late husband's stubborn mouth. The boy she had promised herself she would protect from every shadow that had darkened her own life.
She eased the door closed again, more softly than she had opened it, and returned to her own room.
The card still lay where it had fallen.
Eleanor knelt, picked it up, and carried it to the small writing desk beneath the window. She unlocked the left-hand drawer, the one with the false back she had installed two years after Edmund's death, and slid the card inside, beneath the bundle of letters she had received from a private investigator in '09 and never answered. The drawer closed with a small, definitive click.
She did not sleep for the rest of the night.
By dawn, Eleanor had made her decision. She would not go to the gala. Whatever the card was, whatever game it proposed, she would not play it. She had learned, at a cost she did not care to calculate, that invitations that arrived by unexplained means tended to lead to rooms one did not leave unchanged.
She dressed for the day with the deliberate care of a woman who had decided to behave as though nothing had happened. Grey cashmere. Pearl earrings. Her hair pinned back in the low chignon Marcus had once called her armor. She went downstairs, made herself toast and tea, and reviewed the household accounts at the kitchen table while the morning light crept across the flagstones of the back garden.
Geoffrey came down at half past seven, his school shirt untucked at the back, his tie knotted with the particular despair of a boy who had not yet learned to enjoy the rituals of growing up.
"Mum." He slid into the chair across from her. "Can I have the toast?"
She pushed the plate toward him. "Eat properly. You'll be faint by assembly."
"I'm never faint." He reached for the marmalade. "Dad said I had the constitution of an ox."
"Dad said a great many things."
Geoffrey considered this. "Did he ever say anything about ghosts?"
Eleanor's hand stilled on her teacup. "What makes you ask?"
"Dunno." He spread marmalade with more enthusiasm than precision. "I dreamed about Uncle Edmund last night."
The kitchen went very quiet. The refrigerator hummed its distant, indifferent hum.
Eleanor kept her voice level. "Did you."
"He was laughing. At something I said, I think. I can't remember what." Geoffrey bit into the toast. "Then I woke up and I couldn't remember his face. I know I should remember his face, Mum. I see the picture in the hall."
"You were very young when he died."
"I was four. I know." He chewed, thoughtful. "But I feel like I should remember. He was my uncle."
Eleanor looked at her son. Eleven years old, and already carrying the weight of a grief he could not properly name. She wanted, briefly and fiercely, to gather him into her arms and refuse him to the world. Instead, she said, "You remember him as well as anyone could. Better, perhaps. You remember that he laughed."
Geoffrey nodded slowly. "He laughed at things no one else thought were funny. That's what I remember."
After Geoffrey had left for school, walked to the corner and rounded it with a backward wave through the kitchen window, Eleanor went back upstairs. She unlocked the drawer, took out the card, and held it for a long moment under the stronger light of the morning.
Your brother sends his regards.
She did not believe in messages from beyond. She had refused to believe in them for seven years, and she was not prepared to begin now. But she believed, very firmly, in the cruelty of the living. Someone knew her history. Someone knew where she slept. Someone had entered her house, her bedroom, and placed that card exactly where she would find it.
That, she understood. That, she could act upon.
She put the card back in the drawer and locked it again.
Then she went to the telephone in the front hall and dialed the number of the only person she trusted to ask the questions she could not ask herself.
The telephone rang four times before the receiver clicked, and a voice cut through that was all warmth sharpened to a point.
"Mrs. Ashworth. How unexpected."
"Mr. Voss." Eleanor kept her own voice level. She had learned, over the years of managing the estate, that warmth from a man like Sebastian Voss was a thing to be wary of. He had been Marcus's oldest friend, and Marcus's oldest friend had been the first to offer condolences at the funeral, the first to press a handkerchief into her hand, the first to suggest, very gently, that the firm might benefit from a more experienced hand. She had refused him then. She had been refusing him, in one form or another, ever since.
But she needed him now. Or she needed what he knew.
"I have received a message," she said. "A calling card. In my own home."
There was a silence on the line, and in it she could hear the faintest of sounds, a pen set down upon a desk, the soft slide of a sleeve.
"Read it to me."
"I will not read it to you over the telephone. I would prefer to show it to you in person."
"That," said Sebastian Voss, "would be most irregular."
"I am not asking your opinion, Mr. Voss. I am asking whether you can come to the house this morning."
"I can be there within the hour."
He arrived in forty minutes, which Eleanor noted. He had been waiting for her to call.
He was shown into the drawing room by the housekeeper, and he stood for a moment in the doorway looking about him with an expression of benevolent appraisal, as though he were inspecting a property that might, with the right attention, come back into style.
"Mrs. Ashworth." He crossed the room and took her hand before she could offer it. His grip was dry and cool and slightly too long. "How well you keep this place. One would hardly guess the strain."
She withdrew her hand. "The strain is not a thing I discuss with visitors."
"Of course not. Forgive me." He smiled. It was a smile that involved his mouth and nothing else. "Now. The message."
Eleanor took the card from her pocket and held it out to him. She watched his face as he read it, and she saw nothing cross it. That, in itself, was telling.
Sebastian Voss handed the card back to her. "I see," he said.
"You know who sent it."
"I have a suspicion."
"Will you share it?"
He was silent for a moment, and then he crossed to the window and looked out at the square, his hands clasped behind his back. When he spoke, his voice was thoughtful.
"Your husband's firm, Mrs. Ashworth. Ashworth Reed. It is, I am given to understand, in rather a more delicate condition than the public statements would suggest."
"That is not a secret to anyone who reads the trade papers."
"Quite." He turned back to her. "And yet you persist. You pay the staff. You honor the leases. You keep the office on Regent Street open, though it must cost you a small fortune to heat. Why?"
Eleanor did not answer. She had been asked this question by men far more sympathetic than Sebastian Voss, and she had not answered them either.
"Because it was my husband's," she said, at last. "Because Geoffrey will inherit it one day. Because I will not be the woman who let it go under."
"A commendable sentiment. A foolish one, perhaps, but commendable." He tilted his head. "And yet the firm cannot continue as it is. You must see that."
"I see that we are struggling. I do not see that we must fail."
"You have not, perhaps, been made aware of the precise nature of the struggle."
Eleanor's hands went still in her lap. "Explain."
"Ashworth Reed owes a considerable sum of money to a consortium of creditors, the foremost among them being a Mr. Geoffrey Ashworth."
"My uncle." The name felt strange in her mouth. She had spoken it so rarely. "The man has loaned money to the firm?"
"Your uncle has, over the past seven years, extended credit to your late husband's partners, and those partners have not repaid him. The firm is, in any practical sense, his."
"That is not true."
"The deeds are in his study, Mrs. Ashworth. I have seen them myself."
She stood. The room felt smaller. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I am a man who appreciates being owed a favor. And because there is a way out of the difficulty."
"Say it plainly."
"Your uncle wishes to see the firm continue. He wishes, in fact, to expand it. He has long believed that a union between his house and that of Mr. Blackwood, his partner in the northern venture, would benefit both parties. He proposes a marriage."
Eleanor heard the word as though from a great distance. "A marriage."
"Between yourself and Mr. Callum Blackwood."
She sat back down. The chair received her with a creak.
"Callum Blackwood is thirty-four years old," she said.
"A fine age."
"I am thirty-one."
"A difference of three years. Hardly insurmountable."
"I have a son of eleven."
"Which Mr. Blackwood has agreed to treat as his own."
Eleanor stared at the man before her. Sebastian Voss was smiling his careful smile, his hands still clasped behind his back, his posture that of a man who has delivered good news and is waiting for it to be received as such.
"You have discussed this with Mr. Blackwood," she said.
"I have done more than discuss it. I have drawn up the preliminary agreement."
"And my uncle? He knows of this?"
"Your uncle," said Sebastian Voss, "is the architect of it."
Eleanor rose and crossed to the fireplace. She stood with one hand on the mantel, feeling the coolness of the marble through her glove. She was quiet for a long moment, and in that quiet she felt the whole weight of the situation settle upon her shoulders like a physical thing.
"When," she said, "is this marriage to take place?"
"Within the month. There are papers to be signed, settlements to be arranged. But the principals are agreed, Mrs. Ashworth. There is no impediment."
"Except my consent."
"Which," said Sebastian Voss, "I am given to understand is not strictly required."
She turned on him. "You will leave this house."
"Mrs. Ashworth."
"You will leave this house now, Mr. Voss, or I will have the constable remove you. You will not come back. You will not send messages. You will not approach my son. Do you understand me?"
Sebastian Voss regarded her for a moment. Then he inclined his head.
"I understand you perfectly," he said. "You are proud. You are frightened. You would rather see the firm go to ruin than see it saved by a sensible alliance." He straightened his cuffs. "But pride, Mrs. Ashworth, is a luxury. And you have not, I think, the means to afford it."
He walked to the door. There he paused, with his hand upon the knob, and looked back at her over his shoulder.
"Consider my offer," he said. "And consider it quickly. Your uncle is not a patient man."
The door closed behind him, and Eleanor stood in the drawing room alone. The fire had burned low. The clock ticked upon the mantel. She could hear, faintly, the sounds of the house settling around her, the small groans of an old structure that had stood for a hundred years and might, if she let it, stand for a hundred more.
She crossed to the writing desk and took out a sheet of paper. She sat down. She wrote the date at the top of the page, and then she sat for a long time with the pen in her hand.
She thought of Geoffrey, her son, who had asked her only that morning whether she would let the firm go.
She thought of Lily, asleep in her cradle upstairs, who would not remember her father.
She thought of Marcus, who had left her this burden and this mercy, and who would never know which one would break her first.
She began to write.
To my uncle, Geoffrey Ashworth, Esq.
I have received, this morning, a proposal from your representative, Mr. Sebastian Voss, concerning a marriage between myself and Mr. Callum Blackwood.
I am writing to inform you that I will not consent to this proposal.
I am writing further to inform you that I will not be coerced, threatened, or financially pressured into any such union. If you believe that your position as creditor to the firm gives you the right to dispose of my hand in marriage, I invite you to reconsider that belief.
I will not be at home to Mr. Voss should he call again.
The letter was not long. It was not eloquent. It was, Eleanor knew, a gesture. Her uncle had not built his power over seven years to be undone by a single sheet of notepaper.
But it was something. It was a refusal, set down in ink and sealed with her name, and it would have to do until she could think of something better.
She addressed the envelope. She folded the letter. She sealed it.
Then she sat for a long time at the desk, with her hands folded in her lap, and she looked at the cold fire, and she tried to think what Marcus would have done.
Marcus, she remembered, had been a man who believed in bargains. He had made many in his life, and most of them had held. The ones that had not held had been the ones he had refused to make at all.
She did not know what bargain she could strike now. She did not know what cards she held, or who she might play them against.
But she knew, with a certainty that sat cold in her chest, that the game had already begun.
The bell above the door of The Velvet Room jangled, thin and bright, the sound swallowed almost at once by the murmur of voices and the low, honeyed wail of a saxophone from somewhere in the back. Eleanor stepped inside, and the heat of the room struck her face like a damp hand. Tobacco smoke hung in a yellow veil beneath the low ceiling, thick enough to taste, sweet enough to make her teeth ache.
She was three hours past grief and three minutes past furious. The rain had soaked through her coat on the walk from the taxi stand, and her hair was plastered to her temples in dark, heavy ribbons. She did not care. She had walked into the rain on purpose, because the rain was honest in a way that nothing else had been that night, and because she needed to feel something that was not the slow, grinding ache behind her ribs.
The bouncer at the door had known her. She had not asked how. She suspected she did not want to know. He had stepped aside without a word, and she had walked past him into the red dark of the room beyond, and now she stood just inside the entrance with water pooling at her feet and her gloved hand clenched around the handle of her pocketbook.
The bar ran the length of the far wall, a long slab of polished mahogany backed by a mirror so old and smoke-stained that the bottles on the shelves seemed to float in a yellow cloud. A man in shirtsleeves polished a glass at the far end. Closer to her, a woman in a beaded dress laughed at something a soldier had said, the sound of it high and careless, like a bell struck wrong.
Eleanor made for the bar. She did not want to sit. She did not want to be still. She wanted a drink, a real one, something that would burn on the way down, and she wanted to be left alone with it, and she wanted the night to end so that she could begin the business of the next day, which would be, she knew, more terrible than this one.
She reached the bar. She set her pocketbook down on the wood. She raised one gloved hand to signal the barman.
A voice spoke from the stool at her left.
"I would not order the whiskey, if I were you."
Eleanor's hand stopped in the air. She turned her head.
He was already watching her. He had been watching her, she realized, since she came through the door. He sat with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, his dark overcoat unbuttoned, a glass of something amber balanced between two long fingers. His hair was darker than she remembered, though she had only seen him once, and at a distance, and in circumstances she preferred not to recall.
Sebastian Voss.
The name sat in her chest like a stone.
He was, she had to acknowledge, exactly as she had been told he would be. Tall. Composed. His face had the kind of symmetry that should have belonged to a statue and the kind of color that should have belonged to a man who slept more than he did. His eyes were the pale, washed blue of a winter sky just before snow, and they were fixed on her with an attention that felt less like regard than like assessment.
"I beg your pardon?" she said.
"The whiskey here is dreadful," he said. "It tastes of lamp oil and regret. The gin is tolerable, but the man behind the bar waters it with a free hand. The champagne is passable, if you do not mind that it is not, in fact, champagne."
"I did not ask your opinion, Mr. Voss."
"No," he said. "You did not."
He took a sip of his drink. He did not look away from her. The motion of his throat was slow and unhurried, and there was something in the set of his mouth that suggested he found her interesting in a way she had not intended to be interesting.
"I am sorry about your brother," he said.
Eleanor's hand, which had been resting on the bar, curled into a fist beneath her glove. The leather creaked softly against her knuckles.
"You will forgive me," she said, "if I do not find your condolences persuasive."
"You do not have to find them persuasive," he said. "You only have to hear them."
"I have heard quite enough from you for one evening."
"You have heard nothing from me this evening," he said. "I have been sitting here for the better part of an hour, waiting for you to arrive, and I have not yet had the chance to speak. You have done all the speaking. The letter. The refusal. The refusal of the refusal that will, of course, come tomorrow. You are a busy woman, Mrs. Ashworth."
Eleanor did not sit. She did not intend to sit. She had meant to drink her drink standing, the way her mother had taught her was proper in public houses, and then to leave.
She sat.
It was not a decision. It was, she told herself, a tactical necessity. If she was going to tell this man what she thought of him, and his uncle, and his proposal, she did not intend to do it standing, like a supplicant. She would do it from a stool, like an equal.
The barman appeared at her elbow. She ordered the champagne, because Voss had said it was passable, and because she refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her obey another of his suggestions.
"You are staring," she said.
"I am observing," he said. "There is a difference."
"Not to the person being looked at."
"No," he agreed. "I suppose there is not."
The champagne arrived. It was cold, and the bubbles burst against her lip with a sharpness that was almost a relief. She set the glass down.
"You knew my brother," she said. It was not a question.
"I knew of him," Voss said. "I did not have the pleasure of his acquaintance. He moved in circles I was not, at that time, invited to enter."
"He moved in the same circles as your uncle."
"My uncle's circles are extensive. They are also, in my experience, not entirely his own. He is a tenant in them. He has been a tenant for some time. He will, I suspect, be a tenant for some time yet."
Eleanor turned the glass slowly in her hand. The bubbles climbed the inside of the bowl in a slow, steady stream.
"You are telling me," she said, "that your uncle is not, in fact, the master of his own house."
"I am telling you," Voss said, "that my uncle is a man who has made a series of arrangements, and that he has, on occasion, allowed those arrangements to give him the appearance of a man of greater consequence than he is. I am also telling you that I have come to believe that one of those arrangements has become, of late, an embarrassment to him, and that he has asked me to clean it up."
Eleanor looked at him. The smoke between them had thickened, or perhaps it was only that she had become aware of it.
"The arrangement," she said, "being me."
"The arrangement," he said, "being you. And the house in Southampton. And the boy."
The boy. Geoffrey. The word landed in her chest like a fist.
"If you have touched my son," she said, and her voice was very low, and very even, and she was aware that she had never in her life spoken with that particular tone to another human being, "I will finish what I have started, Mr. Voss, and I do not care what it costs."
"I have not touched your son," he said. "I would not. Children are tedious. They are also, in my experience, the one category of human being whose trust, once broken, cannot be repaired by any subsequent act on the part of the breaker. I prefer to leave them intact."
"That is the most repulsive thing I have ever heard."
"It is also," he said, "true. I am not, Mrs. Ashworth, in the habit of lying about things that do not benefit me to lie about. It is an inefficient practice. It exhausts the liar and it does not, in the long run, fool anyone who is paying attention."
"And you believe I am paying attention."
"I believe you have been paying attention for some time," he said. "I believe that is why your brother is dead."
The words arrived in the air between them and lay there, and did not move.
Eleanor did not move either.
The saxophone had stopped. She had not noticed it stopping. In its place there was only the murmur of the room, and the clink of bottles, and the slow, wet rhythm of the rain against the front window, and the sound of her own breathing, which was louder than she wanted it to be.
"Say that again," she said.
"I will not," he said. "It is not the kind of thing one ought to say twice. It is also not the kind of thing I ought to have said at all, and I would be grateful if you would accept my apology for having said it, which I am unlikely to repeat."
"I will not accept your apology."
"I did not think you would," he said. "I asked for it anyway. It seemed the polite thing to do."
Eleanor set her glass down. Her hand was steady. She was pleased to note that her hand was steady.
"You think," she said, "that I had my brother killed."
"I think," he said, "that your brother was killed by a man who was, at the time of the killing, under the impression that he was acting in his own interest. I think that your brother had, in the months before his death, come into possession of information that he ought not to have possessed. I think that he tried to use that information, and that the use he tried to make of it was clumsy, and that the people he tried to use it against noticed, and that they arranged for him to be removed. I think that you knew, before he died, what he was doing. I think that you warned him. I think that he did not listen. I think that you have, since his death, been very careful not to let it be seen that you knew."
Eleanor was quiet for a long time.
The smoke moved between them. A waiter passed with a tray of glasses. The barman polished another glass. The rain continued against the window.
"If I had known," she said at last, and her voice was not steady now, and she did not care, "I would have stopped him."
"Yes," he said. "I believe you would have. I believe you tried."
"I did try."
"I know," he said. "That is why I am here."
She looked at him. He looked back. There was nothing in his face that she could read, and she had spent the last seven years learning to read faces, and she could read most of them.
"You did not know my brother," she said.
"I did not," he said.
"You have no reason to feel anything about his death."
"I have no reason," he agreed.
"Then why are you here?"
He set his glass down. He folded his hands on the bar in front of him. The gesture was oddly formal, oddly careful, like a man laying down a pair of gloves before a duel.
"I am here," he said, "because my uncle has become, in his dotage, a sentimentalist. He has convinced himself that the Ashworth business can be salvaged through marriage. He is wrong. He is also, I am sorry to say, a liability to me. I have come to the conclusion that the most useful thing I can do, for the firm and for myself, is to ensure that his arrangement with you does not proceed. I am not, however, in a position to countermand him openly. I am, therefore, in a position to make you a private offer."
"An offer," she said.
"A bargain," he said. "A private one. Between ourselves. To be kept from my uncle, and from your family, and from anyone else who might take an interest in the matter."
Eleanor looked at him for a long moment.
She had come here, she realized, expecting a confrontation. She had come expecting to be threatened. She had come expecting to have to refuse, again, and to bear the weight of that refusal, and to walk home in the rain again, and to lie awake again.
She had not come expecting to be offered a door.
"You will forgive me," she said, "if I find it difficult to believe that a man of your reputation would offer a woman in my position a private bargain out of anything other than self-interest."
"You will find it difficult," he agreed. "I would not believe it either, if I were you. I would, however, listen. Listening costs nothing. And the alternative, I think you will agree, is more of the same."
She was quiet again.
The rain had thickened against the window. The room beyond the bar had grown louder, or perhaps she had grown more aware of it. Somewhere in the back, a woman laughed. Somewhere closer, a man ordered another round. The smoke drifted. The bottles gleamed in the yellow light.
"Speak," she said at last. "I am listening."
Voss inclined his head. The motion was small, precise, and entirely correct.
"Then I will speak plainly," he said. "And I will ask you, when I have done, to remember that I am not, by nature, a man who makes offers twice."
She waited. The glass of champagne sat untouched at her elbow. The smoke curled between them, slow and deliberate, and the night pressed against the windows, and the rain went on falling.
She waited.