Chapter 6: Ground Rules

Juno's POV

It was Monday, a few minutes past nine, and Ronan's face was a foot from mine. I could see the thin white scar through his eyebrow and a tiny nick on his jaw where he'd shaved too fast.

I didn't lean back. Leaning back would look like fear.

"My boss doesn't want to be found," I said. "That's why they're good at this."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting."

He straightened slowly. Outside, a truck rumbled past and the old glass rattled in its frames.

"I've looked for Ledger for three years," he said. "Three years. And they send me an assistant who won't tell me her last name."

"You got the answer to Harbor Point in under two minutes." I tapped page forty-one. "You can have the answer, or you can have a name. Pick one."

He looked from the page to me.

"For now," he said, "I'll take the answer."

I heard the for now. He meant me to.

"One thing before we start. So nobody's confused later."

"Go on."

"I'm paying your boss triple what Ellison paid, and I'll keep paying as long as they keep winning." There was no heat in it at all. "The day I get a name, I take everything they have. The house. The money. Whatever's left of their life." He nodded at my bag. "Tell them that. Word for word."

My house. My money. My life. He promised to take all of it, and he said it to my face.

The glass rattled again. I kept my hands flat on the table so they couldn't do anything without me.

"You want to hire someone you've promised to destroy."

"Yes."

"And you expect that person's best work."

"I expect that person likes money. Most ghosts do."

I let three seconds pass.

"I'll pass it on. You should know Ledger quit Ellison Group on Friday night in one line, after five years. You've had one morning with me. If you want Ledger to quit you the same way, keep talking."

He didn't answer. He pulled out the chair across from me and sat. It creaked under him.

"Ground rules. You report to me and nobody else. Whatever your boss sends comes to me first. Not Marcus. Not anyone upstairs."

"Fine. Here are mine. The work stays with me. Nobody copies my notes. Nobody touches my bag."

His eyes dropped to the black leather bag at my feet and came back up. "What's in it?"

"My lunch."

The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn't a smile.

"One more," I said. "What happened Friday night stays at the hotel. We don’t mention it here."

He was quiet so long that I heard a phone ringing somewhere upstairs.

"Friday stays at the hotel."

He reached into his pocket and took out something small and gold. My hair clip. He set it on the table beside page forty-one and said nothing about it.

I didn't pick it up while he was watching.

Twenty minutes later the staff came back with their coffee, and Ronan called Marcus to the long table.

"J reports to me. Only me."

Marcus set his WORLD'S OKAYEST BOSS mug down very carefully. "She walks in with one letter for a name and you hand her the whole bid?"

"She found in two minutes what your team missed in three weeks."

Ronan turned page forty-one around. Marcus pushed his glasses up his nose and read it twice. His jaw tightened.

"Rule six. Local union builders." He looked at me. "Where did you learn to read like that, J?"

"I didn't. Ledger sent me a checklist over the weekend and I checked the page."

I made myself sound like a messenger on purpose. If Marcus decided J could read a contract like that on her own, it was a short walk from J to Ledger. He was the one hunting, and I wasn't going to hand him the map.

"Ledger," he repeated, as if I'd said the tooth fairy. "Funny thing about Ledger. Never wrong, never seen."

"That's two things."

Someone at a nearby desk laughed and turned it into a cough.

Ronan stood. "The city hearing is Friday morning. Four days to swap our builder for a union crew and rewrite the bid around it."

"Three and a half," I said. "It's already ten o'clock."

Marcus picked up his mug and walked off without another word. He didn't look back. He didn't need to. I could feel him watching me for the rest of the day.

Ronan gave me a small room on the second floor, up the metal staircase. Glass walls, a table, two chairs, white blinds he could pull down. The staff called it the box.

I worked in a black notebook. I would never open the silver laptop in that building.

I was halfway down the first page when I saw what my hand had written along the top without asking me. Read the fine print.

My pen stopped.

I ended every Ledger email with those four words. Both emails to Ronan. Nine hundred and forty to Grant. If anyone in this building saw that line in J's handwriting, it wouldn't take them long. Ronan had read it twice already. Marcus had read it too, because Marcus reads everything.

I tore out the page, folded it twice, and pushed it into my pocket. I wrote the rest in the shorthand I'd learned in law school and kept the notebook shut whenever I stood up.

That is the kind of small, stupid thing that hangs people, and I had done it before lunch on my first day.

Ronan spent most of Monday on the phone, pacing outside the glass.

"I don't care what it costs," I heard him say. "I need a union crew signed by Wednesday. Yes, this Wednesday. What other fucking Wednesday is there?"

By nine that night the floor below was empty. The old pipes knocked in the walls.

Ronan came into the box with two paper bags of Thai food and dropped into the chair across from me. Sleeves rolled, collar open. He pushed a carton of noodles toward me.

"Eat."

"I'm working."

"You've been working for eleven hours. Eat, or I'll tell Ledger you fainted."

I ate. The noodles were too spicy and I didn't care.

Under the table, his knee touched mine. Neither of us moved. I pressed my pen into the page until the tip went through the paper.

"Why does Ledger need an assistant, anyway?"

"They don't like people."

"And you do?"

"I don't mind some of them."

He looked at me across the cartons and said nothing.

"Friday stays at the hotel," he said quietly.

"Yes. It does."

He was the first to look away.

On Tuesday morning I read the news on my phone in the back of a taxi. Ellison Group Loses Brooks Building to Chicago Buyer.

On Sunday night Grant had sent the whole Brooks contract to Ledger. At three in the morning, out of habit, I had opened it. The deadline on page nine took me less than a minute to find.

I could have saved him with one email. I went back to sleep instead.

I read the headline again. I waited to feel sorry. It didn't come.

Underneath was a second story from a gossip site. Grant Ellison Files for Divorce. Is This the Other Woman? The photo was grainy, taken from across a wet street at night. Grant helping Tatum out of his car outside a SoHo restaurant, one hand at the small of her back. Her other hand lay on her stomach.

Somebody had told that photographer exactly where to stand. I would have bet every dollar I had it was Sloane.

Below the article, someone had linked Tatum's own page. That morning she had posted a photo of her hand spread across her flat stomach, a diamond bracelet on her wrist, and a caption in pink letters. Some women know how to keep a man. Four thousand likes.

I took a screenshot and saved it. I didn't know yet what I would use it for. I only knew that one day I would.

There was no photo of me. There never had been. He had never taken me anywhere a camera goes, and now his sister was selling a divorce story about a wife nobody in New York could pick out of a crowd.

That was the only reason I could walk into Sayer Capital as J.

By half past ten I was back in the box with pages spread across the whole table. The union crew had signed at dawn. Ronan stood behind my chair, leaning over my shoulder to read the new numbers, and I could feel the heat of him through my sleeve.

"That line." He pointed. His arm brushed mine. "Explain it like I'm stupid."

"That would be easy."

He laughed, low, right beside my ear.

The door flew open so hard it banged against the glass. Marcus stood there, out of breath from the stairs. He looked past Ronan, straight at me.

"Grant Ellison is downstairs," he said. "He's asking for his wife."