Chapter 6: What He Knows

Beckett

I told her at breakfast.

Not because I had a plan for how to do it. I had been thinking about how to do it for three weeks and every version I came up with felt wrong so I just sat down across from her with two cups of coffee and told her.

She listened without interrupting.

That surprised me. I had expected questions. Challenges. The sharp interjections I had watched her use in professional settings when she caught something that didn't add up. Instead she just sat there with both hands around her coffee cup and listened to every word.

I told her about the list first. How my family compiled it. How I went through eleven names and said no to all of them. How her name was twelfth.

Then I told her about the flag.

I watched her face when I said it. She went very still.

"Someone placed a flag on your scholarship file," I said. "Not the university administration. Someone with partial system access who wanted to create a problem without being able to resolve it. They wanted you uncertain. Distracted. Eventually gone."

"Gone from where," she said carefully.

"From Hargrove first. Then from the city. From the professional circles you'd built your way into."

She looked at me. "Who."

"Phillip Strand."

The name landed.

I watched her process it. Strand was her senior partner. Had been at Kellner and Cross for four years. Had been in her professional orbit since she joined the firm. Had been, from everything she knew, a difficult but manageable presence in her career.

"Strand," she said flatly.

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because of me." I kept my voice even. "Strand has a connection to something that happened in my family five years ago. Something I haven't told you the full details of yet. What I can tell you now is that he has been inside your firm for four years specifically to have access to leverage against me. When he realized your name was going to come up in connection with my family he moved on you first. He wanted you gone before you became useful to me."

She was quiet for a long moment.

"You found this," she said slowly. "And instead of warning me you used it."

"I got to you before he could do more damage. I removed the flag from your file the same week I found it."

"That's not what I said." Her voice was very controlled. "I said you used it. You found out someone was targeting me and instead of telling me you built an arrangement around it and brought me in closer."

"Bringing you in closer put you under my protection."

"I didn't ask for your protection."

"I know."

"Beckett." She set her coffee down. "You made a decision about my safety without asking me. You had information that directly affected my life and you chose to use it instead of sharing it."

I looked at her.

"Yes," I said. "I did."

She looked at me for a long moment. I could see her working through it. The anger was there but she wasn't letting it run. She was thinking underneath it which was somehow more concerning than if she'd just been angry.

"The flag on my file," she said finally. "How did Strand access a closed university system."

"He has a contact inside Hargrove's administrative department. Someone he's had in place for years."

"And my partner track. The way it's been stalling for eight months. That's Strand too."

"Yes."

She picked up her coffee again. Looked at it. Put it back down.

"How long has he been planning this," she said.

"Long enough that it predates your time at the firm. You were identified as a potential asset to me before you even knew my name existed."

She sat with that.

I waited.

"The thing I can't decide," she said quietly. "Is whether you telling me now makes this better or worse."

"I told you I would tell you before the first event."

"You told me when it was already too late for it to change anything. I'd already signed. I'd already moved in. I was already at the Calloway dinner." She looked at me directly. "The information would have been more useful three weeks ago."

She was right. I didn't argue with it.

"I know," I said.

"Then why."

"Because three weeks ago you wouldn't have trusted it. You needed to see how I operated first. You needed to know I wasn't using you before I told you someone else was trying to."

She was quiet for a long moment.

Then she stood up. Picked up her coffee cup. Walked to the window.

I waited.

"Strand is going to escalate," she said. Her back was to me. She was looking at the city. "Now that the arrangement is visible and public he knows his window is closing. He'll move soon."

"Yes."

"On me or on you."

"Both. Simultaneously if he can manage it."

She turned around.

And the expression on her face was not what I expected. Not fear. Not even anger anymore. Something harder than both of those things.

"Then we need to be ready," she said.

I looked at her.

"We," I said.

"Yes. We." She held my gaze. "You want protection. I want Strand. Those aren't different things." A pause. "But Beckett. If you make one more decision about my life without asking me first I will walk out of this arrangement and deal with Strand myself and you can explain to Richard Calloway why your wife disappeared after one dinner."

I held her gaze.

"Understood," I said.

She nodded once.

Turned back to the window.

And I sat there at the breakfast table looking at the back of her and thinking that Marcus had been right.

Keeping her at a distance was not going to be possible.

It might not have been possible from the beginning.