Chapter 2: The Preparation

The apartment was small enough that she could hear her own breathing if she held still long enough. Which she did, sometimes. Just to make sure the breathing was still happening.

Saturday came faster than expected. She’d spent most of Friday night and all of Thursday doing the things that needed doing laundry, emails to people she didn’t want to email back, the usual maintenance of staying alive. She’d also spent approximately sixteen hours staring at her closet, which contained exactly twelve pieces of clothing that were worth keeping, and none of them said I belong at a gala in Cannes.

The money had arrived in the account he’d somehow obtained. Fifty thousand dollars. She’d moved it immediately to another account, the one that wasn’t attached to her real name, because keeping money in one place was how people got found. She still had maybe forty thousand left in the original account. It was sitting there like a trap that hadn’t been sprung yet.

She bought the dress on Friday afternoon.

It was at a boutique in the seventh arrondissement that she’d walked past a hundred times without going in. The kind of place where the salespeople didn’t immediately smile at you, which was always a good sign. They sized you up first, decided whether you were worth their time, and then smiled or didn’t smile accordingly.

The woman who helped her older, French, with the kind of face that suggested she’d made a lot of decisions and stood by all of them took one look at Nyx and said, “You need something that looks like it’s trying to be simple.”

“I need something that looks expensive but not desperate,” Nyx said.

The woman nodded once. “Exactly what I said.”

The dress she pulled was black. Not the black of trying to be mysterious. The black of actual simplicity. It was cut in a way that suggested the person who wore it had a specific shape, and that shape was worth noting. There was no sequin, no embellishment, no plea for attention. It was the kind of dress that made you understand why rich women looked rich even when they were wearing nothing: they understood that you didn’t need to announce yourself if you were worth looking at.

It cost three thousand euros. She didn’t haggle.

The shoes took another hour. She found them at a vintage shop near the Marais Chanel, probably from the eighties, the kind of heel that suggested the woman who’d owned them originally had also understood something about not announcing herself. They were silver, which should have clashed with the dress but didn’t. They whispered instead of screaming.

She bought a coat after that. A Burberry, new, the kind that looked old and was therefore expensive. And then she was done, standing in her apartment with a bag of clothes that cost more than her monthly rent, feeling like she’d just opened a door she’d have to walk through now whether she wanted to or not.

The flight was early enough that the sun hadn’t fully committed to coming up. She’d never been on a private jet before, though she’d pretended she had when people asked. It was smaller than she’d expected. Intimate in the way that luxury often is not ostentatious, just efficient. A man in a suit handed her a coffee as she stepped aboard without asking if she wanted one, which suggested Vane had already briefed him on what kind of person she was.

He was already there, waiting in the cabin. He was wearing clothes that looked casual and probably cost as much as her dress. No tie. His shirt was open at the collar in a way that suggested he’d dressed in the dark or didn’t care, and both options meant roughly the same thing.

“You’re on time,” he said.

“I said I’d be on time.”

“People say a lot of things.”

She sat across from him, not next to him. The space between them felt important somehow. A choice. He didn’t object to the choice, which meant either he approved or he was the kind of person who let people make decisions in order to learn something about them later.

“What should I expect?” she asked.

“At the gala?”

“At all of it.”

He was quiet for a moment, looking out the window at the tarmac below. The sun was coming up now, the kind of sunrise that looked like it had been designed specifically to make you feel small.

“You’ll stand next to me,” he said. “You’ll smile when I introduce you. You won’t drink more than two glasses of anything. You’ll pay attention to who talks to whom. You’ll watch the room like you’re taking inventory. And at the end of the night, you’ll tell me everything you noticed that I didn’t.”

“How will I know what you didn’t notice?”

“You won’t. But you’ll notice something I’ll have missed, because that’s what people like us are good at seeing the things that don’t fit.”

People like us. She filed that away.

The jet climbed, and the city below got smaller. She watched it happen, the world shrinking from meaningful to miniature to abstract. She’d done a lot of running in her life, a lot of leaving things behind. This felt different. This felt like stepping into something, not away from something.

“I need to know something,” she said.

He was drinking coffee now, dark and black, the kind that suggested he didn’t believe in milk or softness. “What?”

“Why me? You could get anyone. Someone more experienced. Someone who wouldn’t be..” She stopped.

“Wouldn't that be what?”

“Unpredictable.”

He set his cup down carefully. “I don’t want someone experienced. Experience means people know what to expect from you. What to control. I want someone who hasn’t learned yet how to be controlled.”

“And you think that’s me?”

“I think you’re someone who’s been controlling herself for so long that the difference between those two things has blurred. I think you came to my office on Friday and researched me beforehand because you’re the type of person who prepares for everything. And I think that when you get surprised and you will get surprised you’ll do something interesting.”

She didn’t like being read this easily. She was used to being opaque, to having people slide off her surface without understanding much of anything about the architecture underneath. But he was a different kind of person. The kind who looked at you and saw patterns instead of just seeing you.

“I won’t do anything interesting,” she said. “I’ll do what I’m paid to do.”

“Probably,” he agreed. “But maybe you’ll surprise me anyway.”

The view from his suite in Cannes was spectacular in the way that views from rich people’s suites usually are too perfect, too blue, too much like it was designed to make you feel something specific rather than just showing you what was there. The Mediterranean looked like someone had Photoshopped it.

He’d booked her a room on the same floor. Not next to his two doors down, which meant close enough to arrive together but far enough apart that it looked coincidental. She appreciated that. The boundaries mattered. The fact that he understood they mattered mattered more.

“The gala is at nine,” he said when they got to her room. “You have four hours. Rest if you want to.”

She didn’t rest. She sat on the edge of the bed and tried not to think about the fact that she’d just gotten on a private plane with a man she didn’t know, flown to France, and was about to walk into the kind of room where people decided other people’s fates over champagne. She thought about it anyway.

Her phone buzzed around five o’clock. A message from an unknown number: You’re going to do fine.

She deleted it. Then she deleted the chat history. Then she turned the phone off, because paranoia was just preparation that hadn’t happened yet.

She dressed slowly. The black dress felt different on her body in this light, in this room, with this version of her in the mirror. She looked expensive. She looked like someone who belonged at a gala. She looked like someone who was lying very effectively about being someone she wasn’t.

There was a knock at seven-thirty. He was waiting in the hallway looking like a photograph of himself. Navy suit, cut perfectly, the kind of suit that cost more than cars. His hair was dark, slicked back in a way that suggested military precision, and his eyes were the same color they’d been in the penthouse that old glass color, that color that made you think of things buried a long time ago.

“You look..” he started, then stopped. “You’ll do.”

It wasn’t a compliment, exactly. But it was something.

The gala was the kind of event where people pretended to care about charity while actually just caring about who was there and what they were wearing and whether anyone had noticed they were sleeping with someone they shouldn’t be. It was held in a room that had probably been a ballroom at some point and now functioned as a stage for the very specific theater of being wealthy in public.

She held his arm that was the agreement and moved through the room like someone who had a right to be there. And it was strange how quickly that became true. After the first fifteen minutes, she stopped feeling like an imposter and started just being a woman in an expensive dress at a party.

He introduced her to people. “This is Nyx. She’s… very observant.” That was all he said. No last name. No explanation. No story that was either false or true. Just Nyx, observant, and the blank space people could fill in themselves.

An older woman Italian, probably with the kind of jewelry that suggested old money leaned over and said, “He usually doesn’t bring them to the big events.”

“Doesn’t he?” Nyx said.

“No. Usually it’s just the small dinners. Somewhere public but controllable. You must be special.”

“I’m efficient,” Nyx said.

The woman smiled like that was the right answer.

It was around ten o’clock when she started noticing things. The way the Russian oligarch in the corner kept texting instead of mingling, which meant something was happening elsewhere that mattered more than this party. The way one of the French politicians kept checking his phone after his wife went to the bathroom, which meant either infidelity or embezzlement or both. The way Vane’s hand on her waist tightened when another man younger, handsome in the way that European royalty sometimes was looked at her for slightly too long.

At midnight, he took her out to the terrace. The sea was dark except for the moonlight, and the noise from the party was muffled behind the glass doors. It was quiet enough that you could think.

“So?” he said.

“So what?”

“What did you notice?”

She told him about the oligarch. About the politician. She mentioned the woman near the bar who’d been glancing at another woman’s husband in a way that suggested a long history, the kind of thing that would blow up eventually, probably badly. She told him about the patterns she’d seen money moving around, favors being called in, the invisible currency that wealthy people traded just as easily as poor people traded grief.

He listened without interrupting. When she finished, he was quiet for a long time.

“You’re very good at this,” he said finally.

“At what?”

“Seeing underneath things.”

“It’s not hard if you know what to look for.”

“Most people don’t.”

She turned to look at him. The light from inside the party was casting shadows across his face, making him look older and younger at the same time. “Why did you really hire me?”

“I told you. I wanted to see what you’d do.”

“That’s not a reason.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he reached up slowly, like he was giving her time to move away and touched her face. His hand was warm. His hand was shaking slightly, which surprised her, because she’d assumed men like him didn’t shake.

“Because I wanted to see if you could be trusted,” he said. “And I think you can be. For now.”

She didn’t move. She didn’t pull away. She just let his hand rest on her face and tried not to think about what it meant that she wanted to close her eyes while he was touching her.

“We should go back inside,” she said finally.

He dropped his hand. “Yeah. We should.”

But neither of them moved for another minute. They just stood there, looking at the dark water, pretending that nothing had happened, which was how both of them knew that everything had.