The private room was soundproofed, insulated, sealed away from the rest of the world with the kind of careful architecture that allows a man to exist in complete isolation while still remaining at the center of an empire. Dark wood paneling covered the walls. A single lamp cast warm light across a mahogany desk that had belonged to Jerry Stone's father before him, and before that to his grandfather.The only sound was Debussy. Clair de Lune. The piece played from speakers embedded in the walls, the notes rising and falling with the kind of melancholic precision that most people found soothing.Jerry Stone was not most people.He sat in a leather chair that cost more than most cars, his fingers steepled before his face, his single eye closed while the other remained permanently shuttered behind a scarred lid that had been sealed in a fire thirty years ago. The music seemed to energize him rather than calm him. His foot tapped against the carpeted floor in a rhythm that had nothing to d

The pain was extraordinary.Not the sharp, clean kind that announces itself and fades. The kind that blooms. That starts at the point of impact and spreads outward in concentric rings, swallowing the cheek, the jaw, the temple, filling the entire right side of her face with heat so intense it felt like something was being pressed against her skin from the inside.Vivian's head had gone sideways from the force of it. Her neck strained against the sudden momentum, and for a moment the world simply stopped making sense. Her ears rang, a single high pitched tone that crowded out every other sound in the warehouse, turning the darkness beneath the hood into a sensory void where only the pain existed.She tasted metal.Not immediately. It arrived a few seconds after the slap itself, seeping from somewhere inside her mouth where the impact had driven her cheek against her own teeth. She pressed her tongue against the interior of her jaw and felt the small split there, and the blood that came

Jerry Stone rose from his crouch and stepped back. The cigar moved to his lips once more and the ember brightened, casting a brief, dim glow across the lower half of his face before fading back into shadow. He was careful about that, Vivian noticed. Careful about where he stood, how he positioned himself relative to whatever light existed in the warehouse. As if his face was something he had decided she didn't deserve to see."You don't have the right to ask questions," he said. The words came out without heat, without the need for emphasis. He wasn't making a point. He was stating a fact the way someone states the temperature of a room. Observable. Uncontested. Simply the nature of things as they existed in this particular moment. "Not here. Not with me."Vivian said nothing."I have that right," he continued, and she heard him move, footsteps slow and deliberate, circling her chair without any urgency. "Not you. There's a hierarchy to situations like this. You'll find that it become

Vivian was not simply sitting there.From the moment the hood had been pulled over her head and the chair had stopped moving beneath her, she had been working.Not with her hands, not with her body, because those were accounted for and locked down. With her mind.She had been counting.The number of steps between the door and her chair when they'd brought her in. Roughly eighteen, adjusted for the shuffle in her movement from being pulled.The ceiling height, estimated from the way sound traveled when Jerry's voice rose slightly, the echo placing it somewhere between fifteen and twenty feet.The second door she'd identified on her left, located by the draft that carried the faint smell of rust and outdoor air every time someone moved near it.She had been listening to everything beneath his voice.The distant sound of machinery, either a generator or industrial equipment, somewhere below her feet or through a wall.The faint shuffle of at least two other people stationed near the main

The footsteps had stopped moving.Vivian heard the voice settle into a position somewhere directly in front of her, still outside her line of sight even with the hood, but close enough that she could sense the shift in the room's atmosphere as the man who owned the voice finally allowed himself to be still.She had thought she was prepared. She had built composure like a wall and reinforced it and convinced herself that whatever came next would simply be another thing to endure. But there was a difference between preparing for something abstract and preparing for the moment when the abstract became real and present and wearing a single eye that had seen things.The hand that lifted her chin was different from Jerry's. Stronger. The grip was firm without being cruel, the kind of grip that belongs to someone who has no need to prove their strength because it has been proven so many times already that it has become background information about them.The hood was still over her face. She