CHAPTER 161The meeting place was neutral ground.Not Lucian's estate. Not the Valerio property. A coffee house in the middle of the city that had been operating for thirty years and was the kind of place that existed in every city, unremarkable from the outside, with the specific quality of interior that suggested it had seen enough of human life to be unbothered by any particular version of it.Isabella had suggested it.Lucian had agreed without negotiation, which itself was information. A man who controlled every variable of every situation he entered had accepted a location he hadn't chosen. Which meant either he was extending a genuine gesture or he was confident enough in his own capabilities that the location didn't matter.Jean Baptiste said it was both.Adrian sat in the back of the surveillance vehicle parked half a block from the coffee house and tried to feel less like what he was, which was a person sending the woman he had a complicated and significant relationship with