Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 34: Overheard PART 1

Liam Steel had many qualities that people found difficult to work with, and one of them was an absolute, constitutional inability to let things happen without inserting himself into them.

He had heard about Elizabeth's invitation to Marcus Hayes through the same channel he heard most things that happened within the Steel family orbit — a housekeeper who had worked for Elizabeth for eleven years and who, in exchange for certain financial considerations, kept Liam informed about the traffic through his grandmother's residence.

It was a system he had installed quietly and maintained without Elizabeth's knowledge, which was the kind of arrangement Liam considered prudent and most other people would have considered a profound violation of an elderly woman's privacy.

He heard about the invitation at eight in the morning.

By nine he was in his car.

Diana's office was on the fourteenth floor of the Morrison tower, which Liam arrived at without calling ahead because calling ahead gave people the opportunity to prepare, and Liam preferred people unprepared.

Sophie tried to stop him at the outer office.

He walked past her.

Diana looked up from her desk with the flat, immediate expression of a woman who had catalogued the intrusion, identified its source, and was already calculating the most efficient response.

"Liam." Her voice was the temperature of a February window. "You don't have an appointment."

"I don't need one." He closed the door behind him and crossed to the chair across from her desk, which he sat in without being invited, because that was how Liam Steel operated in rooms. "I'm doing you a favor."

"You've never done me a favor in your life," Diana said. "What do you want?"

Liam leaned forward with the particular, concerned expression he kept for information he was delivering with an agenda behind it — eyebrows slightly contracted, voice dropping to the register of someone sharing something reluctantly.

"Your husband went to see your grandmother this morning," he said.

Diana's pen stilled on the document she had been annotating.

"Without an invitation," Liam continued, pressing forward into the silence. "No one invited him. He just — showed up at her residence. Walked in." He shook his head with the practiced, regretful motion of a man who finds the behavior of others deeply disappointing.

"I don't know what he said to get through the door, but your grandmother's staff confirmed it." He looked at Diana with the earnest expression of a man delivering genuinely troubling news. "Diana. The man has already taken money from your company. And now he's cozying up to the richest member of your family." He paused for effect. "What does that tell you?"

Diana looked at him.

She had known Liam Steel for most of her adult life. She had watched him operate in rooms, at tables, across from people he wanted things from, and she had developed a reasonably accurate instrument for detecting when Liam was performing concern versus experiencing it.

This was a performance.

But beneath that recognition was the other thing — the thing she had been carrying since Sophie had come to her door with the withdrawal notification, the unresolved arithmetic of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and a name she hadn't authorized.

"Mind your business, Liam," she said.

"I am minding my business," he said. "Family business. Your grandmother is —"

"Keep out of my affairs," Diana said, very clearly. "That includes my husband, my grandmother, and anything else connected to me or my household." She picked up her pen. "Close the door on your way out."

Liam looked at her for a moment.

He stood, buttoned his jacket, and left with the controlled composure of a man who had delivered what he came to deliver and was content to let it work.

The door clicked shut.

Diana sat at her desk for forty-five seconds.

Then she stood, collected her coat, and told Sophie to reschedule her eleven o'clock.