The Envelope Refused

The receptionist slid the envelope back across the counter with two fingers, as though it might bite her.

"I can't take these. Confidential. Only the Dawn himself receives them."

"I was told to deliver them here." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Mrs. Duca sent me. They're her son's documents."

"Then Mrs. Duca can tell him to collect them herself." The woman's smile never moved. Behind her, the corridor stretched away in grey stone, and somewhere deeper in the building a door closed with the soft, expensive click of a lock. "You're welcome to wait."

I was already backing away, already calculating the route to the lift, when the air behind me changed — that particular stillness that arrives a half-second before a voice does.

"Nikki."

William stood at the mouth of the corridor with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and he did not look surprised to see me. That was the worst of it. He looked like a man who had been expecting me for some time.

"Mr. Duca." I produced the envelope like a shield. "Your mother asked me to—"

"I know what my mother asked." He took it without looking at it and handed it to the receptionist, who vanished with it down the corridor. "The question is why she sent you rather than a driver."

"I was already coming into town."

"Were you." He walked a slow half-circle around me, and I felt every centimetre of the space between us. "On my turf, Miss Hartley, I decide when guests arrive and when they leave. You're not leaving yet."

"Am I under arrest?"

"You're under conversation." He nodded at my bag. "Your phone's ringing."

I hadn't heard it. Now I did — muffled, insistent, buzzing against my notebooks. I pulled it out. The screen said DUNE COAST SURF CLUB, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

Answer it," William said.

" It's nothing—"

"Answer it. Here. On speaker."

There was no version of this that ended well, so I did the only thing I could: I answered it, and I held it out between us like a confession.

"Good afternoon, Miss Hartley!" A bright, cheerful voice filled the corridor. "Confirming your two-person lesson for Saturday at ten — that's you and Miss Sophia Duca, is that correct?"

" Yes," I said. "Thank you."

"Wonderful. We'll see you both."

The line went dead. In the silence that followed, William's expression did not change at all, which was somehow more frightening than if it had.

"Sophia booked it," I said. "Weeks ago. She's been on at me to learn. It's a coincidence that—"

"That you're standing in my headquarters the same afternoon I receive a call about a lesson booked under my sister's name?" He tilted his head. "I don't believe in coincidence, Nikki. I've buried men who did."

"Then what do you believe?"

"I believe you should wait in my office." He gestured down the corridor, and it wasn't an invitation. "I have questions. And no one gets lost twice in my headquarters."

The words landed like a slap. He knew about the study, then. He'd known all along.

His office was on the top floor, all dark wood and glass, the city laid out beneath the windows in a grey March drizzle. He closed the door and I heard the lock turn — not loud, not theatrical, just the quiet finality of a man who had never once needed to raise his voice to be obeyed.

"Sit."

I didn't sit. "Is this how you treat everyone who runs an errand for your mother?"

"Only the ones who interest me."

"Then I'd hate to see how you treat the ones who don't."

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth — there and gone. He poured two fingers of whisky and didn't offer me any, which I decided was probably for the best, because my hands had started to tremble and I needed them steady.

"Let's go through it again," he said, settling into the chair behind the desk. "You got lost in my house. You found your way into my study. You turn up at my headquarters unannounced. And your voice—" He stopped. Started again, quieter. "Your voice has been bothering me since the moment I heard it."

"Maybe I just have one of those voices."

"Maybe." He set the glass down and looked at me properly, and I had the sudden, vertiginous sense of standing on a ledge. "Or maybe you and I have met before, and you're deciding, right now, whether to tell me."

The room shrank. The walls pressed in. I could hear my own pulse in my ears, and every clever retort I'd ever owned dried up somewhere between my throat and my tongue.

"I don't know what you want me to say," I managed.

"I want you to say something true." He leaned back, watching me the way a man watches a door he expects someone to walk through. "Take your time. I have all afternoon. And Nikki—" he said, and the sound of my name in his mouth was somehow worse than any threat he could have made, "—nobody leaves this building until I'm satisfied."

I sat down. My legs had decided for me.

Outside, the rain kept falling on a city that had no idea I was trapped in a room with the one man on earth I could never lie to well enough — and the clock on his desk ticked on, indifferent, counting down to whatever was going to happen when he finally worked it out.