Chapter Three - The Man Behind the Mask

Celeste

I didn’t wait for Adrian’s security people. I never do well with being handed a schedule.

While the flat filled with Adrian’s phone calls, I slipped out the service entrance and took a cab to the old consultancy office in Clerkenwell. Nobody knew I still kept it. I’d stopped paying attention to it years ago, which was exactly why I trusted what was inside: a locked drawer of offline notes from the season Anne first came smiling into my life.

I let myself into the dark and knew, before I found the switch, that I wasn’t alone. I knew because the blinds were open.

I never left them open. The managing partner in the building opposite had spent eighteen months pretending not to watch me make coffee, and I disliked rewarding persistence.

I closed the door behind me.

“Hello?”

A lamp clicked on across the room.

He sat in my chair as if it had always been his, dark coat, still hands, watching me the way you watch a door you’re expecting to open.

I knew the face from nothing. I knew the name from everything Sienna and Adrian had pieced together afterward.

“Harbinger,” I said.

“Michael.”

“I don’t care what your mother called you.”

His mouth moved.

Barely.

“I’m beginning to understand why Swift finds you difficult.”

“Adrian and I have that in common.”

I dropped my bag onto the desk but kept the pepper spray inside reach.

He didn’t rise. That told me more than a threat would have. Dangerous men who need you to know it stand up.

I considered him carefully. Michael Harbinger.

Sienna and Adrian had uncovered enough after the Harlow disaster for me to know the name. He had spent twelve years inside the architecture that almost destroyed Hartwell Aviation.

He’d helped expose it. He’d also helped build enough of it to make the distinction uncomfortable.

Then he’d vanished.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, and something about the timber in his voice tugged a vague string of familiarity.

It made me distinctly uncomfortable.

“It’s my office,” I replied, proud of the steadiness in my voice.

“Which is why it’s the first place they’ll look. You opened the credential.”

Not a question. My skin went cold. “How do you know that?”

“Because I felt it wake up.” He tilted his head a fraction. “You were told a great many convenient things last year. Almost none of them were true.”

“And you’d be the expert on that. You built the machine that lied to my family.”

“I helped take it apart, too. Both things are true.”  He stood up, unhurried and moved toward my filing cabinet. “You came for the offline backup.”

“My backup.”

“It contains copies of the access data Anne gave you.”

“And?”

“And someone fired a quarter of a million pounds into your account to make you use it.”

I stopped.

“How do you know that?”

“Because the payment wasn’t payment.”

“Insightful.”

“It was a signal.”

“To whom?”

“You.”

I folded my arms.

“Explain.”

“Not here. We need to leave. Whoever paid to put you on those screens spent a fortune to do it. People don’t spend like that and then stop.”

I reached for the cabinet key. His hand covered mine.

The contact was brief. Still, my body recognised something my brain hadn’t.

I pulled away.

“Give me one reason I’d go anywhere with you.”

“You left your security detail.”

“I didn’t lose them. I avoided them.”

“I know.”

I stared at him.

“Was that meant to reassure me?”

“No.”

He came around the desk. Close enough that I caught the shape of his voice when he dropped it low. Again, that tug of almost-recognition.

Then the room tilted.

I’ve spent my life memorising people. Their tells, their tempo, the little verbal habits they think no one clocks. I had spent one night learning a stranger in the dark, and I had told myself I’d never hear that cadence again.

I was hearing it now. A memory snapped into place. Black sheets.  A masked man stopping with his hand between my legs.

Tell me what you want.

I stared at Michael’s mouth.

“No,” I said.

He said nothing.

“The mask.” My voice came out strange. “The Veil. That was you?”

Still nothing. Which was everything.

The floor of my stomach fell away and rage rushed in to fill it, clean and total. For several seconds I considered murder.

Then practical details intruded.

“How?”

“I was there to meet Huxley.”

“Sebastian Huxley?”

“Yes.”

“The dead billionaire I’m apparently servicing by the quarter-million?”

“He was supposed to meet a source.”

“You?”

“No.”

“But you used his credential.”

“Yes.”

I laughed.

“That’s convenient.”

“It was necessary.”

“And then?”

“Huxley didn’t arrive.”

I waited. Michael did not continue.

“And then, Harbinger?”

“You did.”

I wanted to hit him. The fact that a vivid memory of his mouth between my legs arrived at the same time made the situation worse.

“So you abandoned your mysterious spy meeting to have sex with me?”

“Yes.”

“That sounds almost human.”

“It was unplanned.”

“Romantic.”

“It wasn’t intended to be.”

There was the Michael I was beginning to despise. I moved closer.

“Did you know?” I stepped into him, past caution, past sense. “At the club. Behind the mask. Did you know who I was?”

He looked at me. He paused. Half a second. A breath. The smallest hesitation I have ever seen a man make, and I have watched men lie for a living.

That pause was an answer, and we both knew it.

I opened my mouth to burn the building down.

The window exploded.

Glass and sound and a punch of air, and then the floor came up to meet me because he’d already moved, already had an arm around my back and was taking me down and under, his body a wall between me and the dark street.

A second shot chewed the plaster where my head had been.

I couldn’t breathe. His weight held me flat. My heart slammed against the floorboards, against his chest, against the space between us that no longer meant anything at all.

His mouth was at my ear, calm as still water.

“That,” he said, “is why I came.”