Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 29: Angles PART 2

Ryan sat down across from him with the easy, proprietorial manner of a man returning from something that went exactly as planned.

"Good," he said. "Better than good." He adjusted the cuff of his jacket with a slight smile. "She thinks I went against you on the Strong Inc situation. She thinks I pulled the deal back to her firm as a gesture on her behalf."

Lucas looked at him steadily. "And she believes that."

"She believes it." Ryan's smile settled into something more comfortable. "I let her. She's been revising her opinion of me in real time — I could see it happening across the table." He picked up his uncle's second glass, looked at it, and set it back down. "Diana Morrison respects decisive action. She respects someone who takes a risk for a principle. As of tonight, she thinks I'm that person."

Lucas was quiet for a moment.

"And the husband?" he said.

Something moved across Ryan's expression — brief and less controlled than the rest of his face.

"She went to dinner with me," Ryan said. "While he sat at home." He paused. "He's a distraction. Temporary."

Lucas picked up his scotch. "Don't get ahead of yourself. She's not yours yet."

"No," Ryan agreed. "But she's looking at me differently. That's the foundation." He leaned back. "I'll build on it."

Lucas looked at him for a moment with the measuring expression of a man assessing the quality of a tool.

"Don't overcorrect," Lucas said. "Diana Morrison is not a fool. She's been managing people for long enough to recognize when she's being managed." He set his glass down. "Stay in your lane. Be what she thinks you are, not what you're trying to become."

Ryan nodded.

"I know what I'm doing," he said.

Liam's apartment was on the forty-second floor of a residential tower with floor-to-ceiling windows that were currently showing him a city he was not looking at.

He was at his desk.

He had been at his desk since the conference room. Since Marcus Hayes had walked in with his cheap suit and his phone and had, in the space of forty-five seconds, dismantled a deal that Liam had spent two weeks positioning and had taken the Strong Inc contract right off the table in front of him.

The memory of Reynolds's face — the way he had jumped up, the two-handed handshake, the done deal delivered to Marcus Hayes in a conference room where Liam had been thirty seconds from signing — had been sitting in Liam's chest like something with sharp edges since the afternoon.

He had underestimated him. He had assumed that a man in a worn suit who had arrived in Diana's life through a newspaper arrangement was a problem that could be solved with money or bodyguards or simple intimidation, and that assumption had been wrong in ways that were escalating and expensive.

Marcus Hayes was not a thug. He was something else. Something Liam didn't have a clean category for, which was its own problem, because things without categories were harder to handle.

But everything had a category if you dug deep enough.

He looked at his laptop screen.

The darknet forum was not the kind of place Liam Steel's name appeared under normal circumstances. He had used an intermediary — three of them, actually, in a chain long enough to provide distance — and the communication had been brief and specific.

The user who had responded went by a single handle.

Detector Truth.

The response had been three lines: a confirmation, a price, and a timeframe.

The price was significant. Not Steel-family significant — not the kind of money that required a conversation or an authorization — but the kind that communicated, through its own weight, that the service being purchased operated at a level where the usual rules didn't apply.

Liam looked at the number.

He thought about Marcus Hayes standing in Carter Reynolds's conference room with his phone in one hand and Iron Hands International's CEO apparently in his contacts.

He thought about Marcus Hayes catching Diana when she fell, before she hit the floor, and carrying her out of the villa like it was the most natural sequence of events in the world.

He wired the money.

Whatever Marcus Hayes was hiding, Detector Truth was going to find it.

And when he did, Liam was going to make sure Diana Morrison saw every single word of it.