Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 20: Falling Line PART 1

She came downstairs like a weather system.

Marcus was at the stove. The kitchen smelled of eggs and toasted bread and the particular warmth of a room where someone had been cooking with care, and none of it registered on Diana's face as she moved through the space with her bag already on her shoulder and her coat already buttoned and her eyes pointed somewhere several miles past the present room.

"You didn't eat yesterday," Marcus said. He didn't turn around. "Sit down. It'll take five minutes."

Diana picked up her keys from the counter without breaking stride.

"Diana."

The door to the hallway swung behind her. The front door followed thirty seconds later.

Marcus turned from the stove and looked at the empty kitchen.

He plated the eggs anyway, covered them, and left them on the counter where she would see them if she came back at a reasonable hour.

She wouldn't.

The Steel family's city offices occupied the top three floors of a glass tower on Meridian Avenue that had been designed specifically to communicate the message that the people inside it did not need to impress anyone. Lucas Steel's personal floor was the kind of space that had stopped trying to be welcoming sometime in the nineties and had leaned fully into the aesthetic of consequence — dark wood, floor-to-ceiling windows, the accumulated gravity of serious money managed over generations.

His assistant tried to tell Diana he wasn't available.

Diana walked past her.

Lucas was at his desk. He looked up when she came through the door with the measured unsurprise of a man who had been expecting this visit and had simply not known the exact hour of its arrival. He set his pen down and leaned back in his chair.

"Diana." His voice was the careful warmth of a man performing civility he hadn't earned. "This is unexpected."

"The Strong Inc meeting," Diana said. She closed the door behind her and stayed near it, which was a deliberate choice — she wasn't here to sit down and negotiate. She was here to confirm what she already knew. "Liam didn't plan that on his own. He doesn't have the patience for four months of positioning and he doesn't have the relationship with Reynolds's office." She held Lucas's gaze without effort. "That was yours."

Lucas looked at her for a moment. Then the performance of pleasant confusion he had been assembling visibly lost interest in itself and he let it go.

"Liam is enthusiastic," he conceded. "I occasionally help him direct that enthusiasm productively."

"You sabotaged a contract I spent four months building," Diana said. "In my own conference room."

"I created a competitive situation," Lucas said, with the gentle correction of a man explaining something to someone he finds mildly exhausting. "That's how business works, Diana. You know this."

"Don't do that."

"You're a smart woman." He folded his hands on the desk. "Smart enough to know that this doesn't have to be difficult. Your family, this firm, everything you've built — it could be considerably more secure than it currently is." A pause weighted with its own particular meaning. "Ryan is still interested. Despite everything. Despite the — arrangement you've made." His voice moved carefully around the word. "That says something about his character, I think."

"It says something," Diana agreed, in a tone that did not specify what.

"There's no version of this," Lucas said, and his voice dropped its performance entirely now, settling into the flat, direct register of a man stating terms, "where you keep that contract and keep that husband and keep operating the way you've been operating. That version doesn't exist." He met her eyes. "Short of divorcing Marcus Hayes and agreeing to formalize things with Ryan, there is nothing you can do to save the Strong Inc deal. Reynolds's office will decline. We'll make sure of it."

The room was very quiet.

Diana looked at Lucas Steel — at the absolute, comfortable certainty of a man who had never once operated in a world where his money didn't arrange the furniture — and she felt the specific, nauseating weight of a wall that didn't have a door in it.

She left without saying goodbye.

The drive back took forty minutes in traffic.