chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX — Eleven Minutes

She shoved him off so hard he had to catch the pillar.

"Josie—"

She was already moving. Across the mezzanine, past the dead terminal, straight at the elevator where the man had stood not ninety seconds ago, wide open now, empty, lit, humming with nothing in it at all.

She hit the call button on the second car. Empty. The third. Empty.

"There was a man," she said, and heard her own voice come out wrong, too fast, the way it did when she stopped controlling it. "There was a man right there, he *spoke* to me—"

"Josie." Julian's hand closed around her wrist, not rough, just final. "Look at me. What did he say?"

She told him. Two words. A name nobody used anymore.

Julian's face did something she hadn't seen it do yet. It went very still, the way a lake goes still right before weather.

Security gave them forty seconds of black frames from that camera and nothing else. The feed simply stopped, the way water stops when you turn a tap, and started again forty-one seconds later with the mezzanine empty and the elevator doors shut.

"Scrubbed clean," the security lead said, not looking at either of them. "Whoever did it knew exactly which four cameras to touch. Ours, and three in the lobby."

Julian didn't say anything. He walked out of that room with his jaw set and Josie half a step behind him, and in the car, once the door shut and the privacy glass went up, he turned on her.

"You went to that terminal alone."

"I saw Crawford Vale moving forty million dollars under my dead father's name. What was I supposed to do, applaud?"

"You were supposed to come find *me*."

"You were kissing me against a pillar for cover, Julian, I didn't have a lot of options—"

"That's not what I'm angry about."

"Then what—"

"You let them see what you can do." His voice dropped, and it dropped hard, and for the first time she understood that this wasn't temper, this was fear wearing temper's clothes. "You stood at that microphone tonight and you told four hundred people, in detail, everything you'd heard in that room since seven o'clock. Do you understand what you did?"

"I embarrassed Regina."

"You told every single person in that ballroom that Josephine Sterling can read a room from across it. That she doesn't need to be close. That she doesn't need sound." He was leaning toward her now, and his voice had gone low and urgent. "For twenty-six years you've walked through rooms full of people who talked over you like you were furniture. That was your whole advantage. It's gone. As of tonight, every person in my company who has ever said a careless word in front of you is going to remember exactly what they said, and to whom, and they will never, ever say it again where you can see their mouth."

Josie sat very still.

"And then," Julian said, quieter, "you're useless to me. And dead to them."

She hadn't thought of it that way. She had thought of it as a woman defending herself at a microphone. He had watched her disarm herself in front of four hundred witnesses and hadn't been able to stop it.

"I'm sorry," she said, and meant it, which surprised her.

He didn't answer. He looked out the window for a long moment, and something in his shoulders came down half an inch.

"Tell me about the signature."

She told him. The terminal, the open document, the second signature card with thirteen letters on it that belonged to a dead man, the date eight months after the funeral.

Julian went white.

Not pale. White, all the way to his mouth, the color leaving him so fast she actually reached for him before she caught herself.

"Say that again," he said. "The date."

"Eight months after his funeral."

He was quiet for a long time. The car turned onto the highway and the city lights went past the window in long yellow smears, and she watched his throat move once, twice, before anything came out of it.

"Josephine."

He turned his head so she could see his mouth. Not for staging. Not for anyone watching. Just for her.

"Whose signature is on my father's death certificate?