Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 27: Misread PART 2

"An introduction was brokered," Reynolds continued, "contingent on this partnership moving forward with your firm. Which tells me —" he looked at her with the frank expression of a man stating something he found both surprising and worth stating — "that you have a very powerful person in your corner, Ms. Morrison." He tapped the contract gently. "You're lucky."

Diana looked at the contract.

She signed it.

Reynolds thanked her, shook her hand with both of his the way he had in the conference room, and left.

Diana sat with the signed copy in her lap and her phone in her other hand and the quiet, reorganizing sensation of a situation that had been pointing in one direction suddenly pointing in another.

A very powerful person in your corner.

She thought about Ryan. About the way he had come to the hospital — dressed well, prepared, with the forward momentum of a man executing a plan he had constructed in advance. About the way he had spoken in her room — I'm going to get to the root of it, I'm going to fix everything — before she'd sent everyone out.

He had said that. Specifically that.

And then the contract had arrived.

She turned her phone over and dialed.

Ryan picked up on the second ring.

"Diana." His voice carried the particular warmth of a man who had been hoping for this call and was performing not having been hoping for it. "How are you feeling?"

"Better," she said, with her usual efficiency. "I wanted to call and say thank you."

A pause. "For?"

"Don't," Diana said. "Modesty doesn't suit you and I don't have the energy for it tonight." She kept her voice even — not warm, but the specific quality of even that acknowledged something without making it larger than it needed to be. "You went against your father and Liam on this. That wasn't nothing. I know what that cost you politically." Another pause. "So. Thank you."

There was a silence on Ryan's end.

Not long — two seconds at most. The compressed silence of a man receiving unexpected information and making a rapid decision about what to do with it.

"Of course," Ryan said. His voice had shifted — something new underneath the warmth now, a more focused quality, the tone of a man who has been handed an opportunity and is already calculating its dimensions. "You don't have to thank me. But —" a brief pause, weighted with intention — "since you brought it up."

"What?"

"I helped you," Ryan said. "That's not nothing, like you said. So I have a condition."

Diana's eyes went to the ceiling. "What condition?"

"Dinner," Ryan said. "One dinner. Somewhere appropriate. You and me, no family, no contracts, no business." His voice was easy, practiced, the tone of a man making a request he has already determined sounds reasonable. "Just a meal. To say thank you in person, like a human being. That's all I'm asking." A pause. "Harmless."

Diana considered it.

She thought about the signed contract in the folder on her bedside table. About four months of work that had been restored in an afternoon. About a man who had apparently gone against his father's strategy — Lucas Steel, who did not get gone-against — to put a deal back on her table while she was lying in a hospital bed.

One dinner.

She thought about what Catherine would say. She thought about the fact that she didn't particularly care what Catherine said. She thought about the fact that it was a meal — a public meal, presumably, in a restaurant, with other people present — and that meals were finite and meals were not contracts.

"One dinner," she said. "That's all this is."

"That's all," Ryan agreed, and she could hear the smile in it.

"Fine," Diana said.

She ended the call and set the phone on the blanket and looked at the folder with her signature in it and thought about the expression Reynolds had worn when he said the words very powerful person.

She thought about Ryan Steel, who had always been polished and strategic and entirely predictable, walking into a Steel family operation and pulling it in a different direction.

She supposed people could surprise you.

She picked up the folder and read the contract again from the beginning, checking every clause with the same meticulous attention she always brought to documents that mattered.

She didn't think about Marcus Hayes at all.

Or she tried not to.