Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 21: Empty Part 1

She almost missed it.

The shift was so brief — a fraction of a second, a single frame in an otherwise continuous reel — that if she had blinked at the wrong moment she would have seen nothing at all. But she hadn't blinked, and for just that sliver of time, behind the composed and patient surface of Marcus Hayes's expression, something else looked back at her.

Not anger. Not hurt. Something considerably more serious than either of those things — the quality of stillness that exists on the far side of genuine capability, the specific kind of quiet that isn't empty but compressed. Like a room that appears unoccupied until you notice the temperature is wrong.

Then it was gone.

His face returned to its default — calm, settled, unremarkable — and Diana stood in the entrance hall wondering if her own exhaustion had manufactured it.

"If you don't eat," Marcus said, "you'll get sick. That won't be good for either of us."

Diana looked at him for a moment longer than she intended to.

Then she made a sound that covered several things she didn't have words for, turned toward the staircase, and went up without looking back.

She didn't eat.

She sat at her desk for two hours reviewing documents that she read three times each without retaining, and then she lay on top of her bed covers in her work clothes and looked at the ceiling until the room was dark, and then she looked at it a while longer.

She did not go down for dinner.

Morning arrived with the aggressive indifference of mornings that don't account for the quality of the night that preceded them. Diana was dressed and downstairs before seven, running on the specific compressed energy of someone who has decided that momentum is a substitute for restoration.

The kitchen smelled of coffee and something warm on the stove.

She picked up her keys.

"Diana." Marcus's voice from the kitchen doorway.

She didn't stop.

Strong Inc's headquarters occupied a glass tower in the financial district that had been designed to project permanence and inaccessibility in equal measure. Diana had been here twice before, both times with scheduled appointments and the appropriate advance clearance.

This time she had called Reynolds directly from the car and told him she was coming.

The guards at the lobby desk did not get that memo.

"Name," the one on the left said, without looking up from his screen.

"Diana Morrison. I'm here to see Carter Reynolds."

The guard looked up then — the full, appraising sweep of someone deciding in approximately two seconds whether a person in front of them clears the threshold of relevance — and apparently arrived at a conclusion that she did not.

"Do you have an appointment?"

"I spoke with Mr. Reynolds twenty minutes ago."

"I'll need to see confirmation of a scheduled appointment in the system." He turned back to his screen with the finality of a man who had made a decision. "I don't have anything here under that name."

"Then your system is incomplete. Call Reynolds's office directly."

"Ma'am, if you're not in the system —"

"Call his office," Diana said, very clearly.

The guard's expression acquired the particular flatness of someone who has decided that a person in front of them is the kind of problem that gets managed rather than assisted. His colleague on the right had stopped pretending to look at something else.

"You'll need to step aside and wait," the first guard said. "We have a queue."

There was no queue.

Diana stood at the desk in the lobby of Strong Inc headquarters while two security guards treated her like someone who had wandered in off the street, and she pulled out her phone and called Reynolds herself.

The guards let her through three minutes later with the blank, bureaucratic indifference of people who had been overridden and were declining to acknowledge it.

Reynolds's office was on the fourteenth floor. He received her standing, which was not a good sign, and gestured to the chairs with the brief, professional courtesy of a man who had already made up his mind and was about to be kind about it.

"Ms. Morrison." He sat across from her with his hands folded on his desk. "I have to be honest with you about where things stand."

"Please," Diana said.

"The Steel family's offer is substantive," Reynolds said. "Their infrastructure, their existing relationships with our partner firms, the f*e structure —" He paused. "It's difficult to compete with on paper."

"Our proposal is more tailored to Strong Inc's specific accounting requirements," Diana said. "Steel Holdings is a generalist operation. We built this proposal around your actual —"