The conversation resumed the way water resumes flowing after you’ve dammed it briefly with your hand—present, persistent, and entirely aware that the interruption had been noted by everyone in the room.
We talked terms, and I don’t remember the specific words because the specific words weren’t what I was tracking. I was tracking the temperature of the room, the angle of Seraphine’s attention, the small muscle near the corner of her eye that activated when something she heard landed differently than she’d expected, and all of that required a level of sustained focus that left nothing spare for the actual content of what my mouth was producing.
I responded at the appropriate intervals, useful sentences formed and departed without my active participation, but the rest of me was somewhere else entirely.
It had hit me the moment she’d stood over Elvina—that aura, arriving in the air the way cold arrives ahead of winter, not dramatic but total, preceding its source by a breath.
I’d felt it once before, in the tower, in the presence of the senior operatives who’d earned their rank through years of violence and the particular refinement that violence produces when it’s practiced long enough to become something close to art.
The killing intent of a trained fighter doesn’t announce itself loudly because it doesn’t need to—it simply changes the quality of the air the way a drawn blade changes a room, nothing has happened yet but every nervous system in the vicinity has already received the memo and filed it under act accordingly.
Seraphine’s had been all of that, and then some.
I revised my estimates quietly, the way you revise a budget when the actual invoices start arriving and you realize the original numbers were optimistic in ways that bordered on fiction.
She was Velvet rank at minimum—possibly above it. I knew then that raiding the brothel would’ve been catastrophic, I’d known it intellectually when I made the call, and now I knew it in the specific way you know things after you’ve stood in the same room as the reason and felt it pressing against your instincts like a wall you couldn’t see.
The poison had been the right call. The only call.
And gods, it was almost funny in its simplicity—the oldest trick in the oldest book, the kind of scheme that appears in the first act of every play ever written about political treachery, so thoroughly clichéd it had looped all the way back around to brilliant purely by virtue of nobody expecting anyone with actual intelligence to reach for it.
I nearly laughed, yet I kept the laugh in the same place I was keeping everything else, filed behind the stone face under later, right next to the entry that read do not make any expressions whatsoever until this is finished.
The poison was only the beginning, of course. If everything went the way I’d built it to go, the full shape of the plan would reveal itself. For now I sat with the parts I could see and trusted the architecture of the rest, which was either the mark of a competent strategist or a man with too much optimism and not enough exits, and I preferred the first interpretation enough to commit to it.
The side door opened.
Elvina came back through it carrying a small bowl of sugar and a spoon. The state of her hands told the whole story before she’d covered half the distance to the table. The trembling was fine—fine enough to pass as nerves, which in this room, for a slave in the presence of the woman who’d just backhanded her into the floor, was an entirely reasonable thing to have and would raise no flags—but I watched the way she managed it, keeping the spoon pressed against the rim of the bowl so any rattle was absorbed before it could become sound, eyes forward, pace measured and correct.
She’d done well getting here. She was still doing well. She measured the sugar into Seraphine’s cup, set the spoon down without a sound, and stepped back.
Seraphine looked at the cup.
Reached for it.
Picked it up.
I sat very still and let nothing show and waited for the thing that was about to happen to happen.
Then seraphine turned to address a question at Julius—something about the theater’s location, the phrasing light and conversational—and the cup went with her, resting in her hand, not raised, not lowered, simply held the way people hold things when their attention has moved elsewhere and the object hasn’t caught up yet.
Julius answered. I heard the words as vibration without content. My eyes were fixed on the cup with the singular devotion I usually reserved for things I was trying to steal.
She turned back, nodded once at whatever Julius had said, and the cup began its slow return toward her face.
Then one of Seraphine’s people materialized from the door near the desk—a tall woman in dark clothing who bent and murmured something close against her employer’s ear. Seraphine’s attention shifted entirely, the cup descending back to the table with a soft click while she listened to whatever was being reported with focused stillness.
The exchange lasted a few seconds. I counted each one with something close to physical pain.
The tall woman withdrew as Seraphine returned to the room, to me, and to the conversation, but not to the cup, which sat between us cooling with the patient indifference of an object that didn’t understand what was riding on it.
Drink the tea, I thought, with tremendous restraint. It’s right there. It’s getting cold. You went to the trouble of asking for the sugar and the sugar is in it. Everything you require from this cup is present and accounted for. Drink. The. Tea.
She asked me something about revenue projections for the coming quarter instead—sharp, specific, the kind of question with actual numbers expected in the answer—and I gave her those numbers while my peripheral vision maintained its devoted surveillance of the cup, which continued doing absolutely nothing at all.
A few minutes later, with no fanfare or preamble, she picked it back up. Finally. My pulse did something embarrassing and private.
She held it the way she’d held it before—thinking with it rather than drinking from it, the cup at chest height while she finished a thought she was still somewhere in the middle of—and after she finished, she brought it toward her lips, and I sat very still with my face exactly where it needed to be and waited until—
Nara sneezed.
The sound in the silence was spectacular, the kind of full-body sneeze that small creatures produce against all reasonable expectation, arriving at precisely the wrong possible moment, and she followed it immediately with a small mortified noise that was somehow worse.
Seraphine lowered the cup a fraction as her eyes moved toward Nara, the reflexive attention of everyone in a quiet room when something loud and unexpected occurs.
I am going to kill her. The thought arrived with total clarity, serene and complete, the way enlightenment must feel when it finally descends. I am going to wait until this is over and then I am going to take that tail of hers and I am going to—no. No, focus. Focus. The cup. Look at the cup. She’s still holding the cup, this is fine, everything is fine, Nara is a valued member of this crew and I do not want to feed her to the murder bunnies outside, that would be an overreaction.
"My apologies," Nara said, ears flat, tail drawn tight, radiating sincere mortification.
Seraphine’s eyes held on her for a moment, then returned to the cup, and mercifully the cup began rising toward her lips again with nothing intervening—no questions, no murmured reports, no catastrophic nasal events from small furry crew members—her fingers closed around the handle and the cup rose in one continuous motion toward her mouth.
Then the quality of her stillness changed.
It was subtle enough that I’d have missed it a few weeks ago, before Iskanda spent hours teaching me to read a room the way predators read terrain.
Seraphine’s attention moved from the cup to the room in a motion so natural it almost didn’t register as a motion at all, her eyes traveling without hurry and landing briefly on each face with great patience.
My face did nothing. Behind me, my crew did nothing.
Seraphine set the cup down.
"Elvina," she said, and the name landed with a pleasant lightness that was quietly doing several units of work beneath the surface.
Elvina stepped forward. "Yes, Madame."
"Did you do something with the tea?"
Did you do something with the tea? Conversational—genuinely curious-sounding, in the way certain questions sound curious when the person asking them has already settled on the answer and is now interested in the performance of the denial, the way a cat watches a mouse it has already caught decide whether to run.
Elvina’s face held. "No, Madame," she said, steadily. "I prepared it as you prefer."
The pause that followed had weight.
Then Seraphine laughed—not the controlled, socially functional version she’d produced twice during our conversation, but something fuller and freer, the sound of a person caught off guard in a direction they hadn’t been expecting. It lasted several seconds and left her expression briefly unguarded in its wake. For one window of perhaps three heartbeats, Madame Seraphine looked almost human.
On Elvina’s face during that laugh, every contradictory emotion she was currently managing made a brief and simultaneous unplanned appearance—relief, confusion, something raw and unnameable—visible for a second before the mask came back down with practiced efficiency.
The laugh faded and left something colder behind it.
"Drink it," Seraphine said simply.
Elvina didn’t move.
"The cup," Seraphine said, and the pleasantness had vacated entirely, replaced by something clean, cold, and ancient, that same killing intent bleeding into the edges of her voice like ink into water. "Pick it up."
Elvina’s fingers reached for the cup and made contact with the ceramic. The cup rose in two stages as though her arm had briefly reconsidered its participation halfway through and had to be reminded of its instructions.
She held it at chest height with very still eyes and a face that had surrendered its color in a complete and unanimous departure.
And then she drank—a small sip, controlled, the minimum required to constitute compliance. The cup returned to the table before the swallow had fully completed, and she stood with her hands at her sides, waiting with particular stillness.
Seraphine watched her and said nothing, just waited. The silence moved through thirty seconds and then a minute with nothing happening as Elvina’s expression cycled through three distinct versions of confusion before she clamped it back down.
Something crossed Seraphine’s face that I’d never seen there before and hadn’t expected—pure, unmanufactured puzzlement, the expression of a calculation that had returned an impossible result and was running itself again to check for an error in the inputs.
Another minute. Still nothing.
Seraphine shook her head once, something in her posture releasing a fraction of whatever it had been holding, and reached for the cup again with the air of someone who’d decided to stop being interested in a problem that has declined to resolve itself—raised it, and drank, not a sip but a full unhurried measure, the kind of drink that carries a decision in it and doesn’t apologize for the weight.
My eyes went wide before I could stop them. For a fraction of a second the stone face was simply gone, replaced by the smile I kept locked away for moments when a plan reached the exact place I’d built it toward—slow and sharp, spreading from one corner of my mouth to the next with the quiet satisfaction of a lock yielding to the right key.
Seraphine saw it the instant it appeared.
"What’s with that expression?" She said, with the beginning of something that might’ve been amusement before her hand went to her face, the instinct preceding the conscious knowledge.
When her fingers pulled back there was red on them, a thin bright thread tracking from her nose down over her lip. Her other hand pressed flat against her sternum as the pain arrived.
The color left her face in the span of a single breath, draining out with the swift completeness of a tide going out all at once.
She looked up at me. The fury in her face than was indescribable. Behind it lived a specific quality of understanding—she wasn’t a woman who’d been blindsided by betrayal itself, only by the particular shape this one had taken, the angle it had come from, the face it had worn while walking through her door.
"What is this?!" she said, sharp and clipped, the control cracking audibly at the seams. "What did you—!" Her voice climbed, one hand still pressed to her chest where the pain was doing something thorough and increasingly persuasive. "What have you done—!?"
I leaned forward, unhurried, and let the smile carry everything I’d built toward this moment—everything planned, everything waited for, everything held behind the stone face through the duration of a conversation that had been, from its first word, a prelude.
"The preliminary terms were quiet generous," I said pleasantly. "But I think it’s time we let the real negotiations begin.