Chapter 3

Edgar's eyes narrowed, and the panic went somewhere useful. "You were in the closet," he said. "I was." He drew himself up. With the lie dead, he reached for the only other instrument he owned. "Fine. You saw. Grow up, Ellery. You're not a girl reading fairy tales in some upstate boarding school. Men in my position have appetites. What I do with Amber in private has nothing to do with what we're building." He advanced a step, wet chest catching the track lights, and let his voice drop into the register he used on junior associates. "Your father's holdings default in two weeks. The Horn Group is the only thing keeping Case Properties out of bankruptcy court. You want to walk out of here on the high moral ground? Do it. Then explain it to your landlord as a broke art student who can't cover next semester's tuition." Behind him, Amber had found her nerve again. She pulled the robe tighter and smirked. "He's right, sweetie. Be smart about this. Society wives look the other way. You get Park Avenue, I get the weekends. Everyone wins." The golden boy of Wall Street and his sponsored mannequin, delivering the same speech in the same key. Something in Ellery came unstuck, and it felt wonderful. "Everyone wins," she said. In her right hand she still had one of the flats she'd been carrying — Italian leather, custom stacked heel, a brass rim around the base that she'd never once thought about in two years of wearing them. She turned into it the way you turn into a punch and caught him with everything she had. The brass heel took Edgar square on the left cheekbone. It sounded like a melon hitting concrete, and later, telling Felicie about it, she would not manage to sound sorry. Blood sprang from a split beneath his eye. His head snapped around. He went backward into the marble console and took an antique silver tray down with him. "You crazy bitch!" Amber shrieked, and launched herself forward. Ellery didn't even turn her head. Her left hand came up and caught Amber flat across the jaw, clean and hard, and the supermodel went down on the hardwood with both hands over her face. "That was for two years," Ellery said. Edgar was on his knees, swearing through the hand clapped over his eye, blood running between his fingers and down his wrist. She reached up, took hold of the six-carat emerald-cut diamond on her left hand, and twisted it off over the knuckle. It scraped. It left a red ring. She didn't look at it. She flicked it across the room, and it turned once in the afternoon light and dropped into the open toilet of the powder room with a small, undignified plop. "That," she said, "is where you and your promises belong." He got up. "Ellery! You walk out that door and I will bury you. Everything you care about, I will take it apart." "Try it, Mr. Horn. As of this second you don't exist to me." She ran. Bare feet on herringbone, through the double doors, past the elevator bank, into the service stairwell before he'd finished screaming at his doormen to close the lobby. Concrete stairs, flight after flight, cold paint underfoot. Near the ground floor, she cut into a maintenance corridor, hit the fire door, and came out into the delivery alley with the autumn wind taking her breath away. She sat down on an upended milk crate, put her shoes back on with hands that didn't work properly yet, and started walking. Somewhere above her Edgar was on the phone. Ahead of her the avenue was enormous and cold and — this was the strange part — clean. Across the street, parked in the shade of an English elm, an obsidian Rolls-Royce Phantom sat with its engine turning over. Inside, Darius Mendez watched her go past. Felicie's uncle, and the last man in North America anyone wanted on the other side of a trade, had his legs crossed at the ankle with an unlit Havana between his fingers. He had seen her come out the service door. He had seen the shoe in her hand with someone else's blood darkening the leather. He had seen her face. "Sir." The tactical lead in the front passenger seat turned his head slightly. "Case's daughter appears to have had a violent difference of opinion with young Horn. She's on foot, heading toward Lexington. Shall we intercept and offer transport?" Darius rolled the cigar a quarter turn and watched her walk. Small. Straight-backed. Not looking back once. "No," he said. "Don't spook her." He settled into the leather. "Signal the sweep cars. Fall back two blocks. Follow her cab at a distance nobody notices. She reaches the Columbia gates without a single Horn employee breathing near her." "Understood, Mr. Mendez." Outside, Ellery raised an arm and flagged down a battered yellow taxi. Darius watched the taillights go up the avenue and disappear. Seven years he'd been watching her move through cages her father built and that English boy decorated. "Driver," he said. "Keep pace. Let's make sure my niece's best friend gets home."