“And then you’re going to stay in this building until I decide what to do with what you’ve told me.” Marcus nodded. He started talking. Upstairs Violetta was awake. She’d been awake since she’d heard the side door close. The specific acoustic quality of this house was becoming familiar to her with the speed that unfamiliar places become familiar when you’re paying very close attention, which she was, because attention was the only resource she had in surplus.
She heard footsteps. Heard the office door. Heard through the floor the muffled texture of a conversation that had the cadence of interrogation without the specific words. She pressed her hand to her stomach. The baby moved. A slow, deliberate movement, elbow or knee working its way across in the underwater slow way of a baby with enough room and enough calm to stretch.
She exhaled. Dr. Yuen had been in at 7:00. The chelation protocol was working. The toxin levels in her blood had dropped enough in the first cycle that Yuen had allowed herself a brief expression of something adjacent to relief before recomposing into her normal register of controlled information. The baby’s vitals were good.
Her own pressure was elevated but manageable. She was medically stabilizing. Everything else was the opposite of stable. She needed to think clearly, which meant she needed to stop letting herself feel the enormity of it and work the parts she could work. Someone had poisoned her. That was a fact, documented, evidenced.
The poison had come through her prenatal care. That pointed to Dr. Marsh’s practice, which pointed to the access Grant had to that practice. The financial fraud charge against her was fabricated. She’d known this was coming for 14 months, had tried to stop it from inside, had failed. Grant was moving on Hail Biotech.
He had been moving on it since before they married, possibly, or had pivoted to it once he understood what she had inherited. And now someone knew she was here and was using that knowledge as leverage. She’d heard enough through enough floors to know that whatever conversation was happening downstairs had the shape of a betrayal being uncovered, which meant the facility wasn’t as sealed as Ronan had believed.
Which meant she was not as safe as she’d briefly, foolishly, allowed herself to feel. She got up. The IV was on a rolling stand. Ewan had switched her to a mobile unit this morning in anticipation of her needing to move around. She took the stand with her to the small closet where her suitcase had been placed. Her clothes were dry now.
She dressed slowly, carefully, with the awkward deliberate choreography of someone eight months pregnant who’s been lying down for several hours and is working with a body that has opinions about movement. She was lacing her second shoe when the door opened. Ronan looked at her. At the shoes. At the suitcase she hadn’t opened but had positioned near the door.
“You were listening,” he said. “The floor carries sound.” He came in and closed the door. He didn’t tell her to sit down. He stood near the window. Same position as in the office below, she realized. Window as default. The posture of someone who thinks better with an exit in his peripheral vision. “We have a problem,” he said.
“More than one.” “Which one specifically?” “Someone inside my organization gave your location to the people looking for you. I’ve contained it, but they had a 12-hour window and it started” He checked his watch. “90 minutes ago.” She finished lacing her shoe and stood up. “They’re going to come here.” “Possibly.
I have teams rotating on the perimeter, but the facility has vulnerabilities that I’m not comfortable with now that we know someone was mapping it from inside.” “So I need to move.” “Yes.” “Where?” “I have a secondary location, more secure, off any list Marcus had access to.” She looked at him. “Marcus?” “My logistics director.” “He was compromised six weeks ago.
” He said it with the flat economy of someone who has finished feeling whatever he was going to feel about it and is now in the part that comes after. He gave them routes, facility information, access schedules. In exchange for what? Removal of his name from a federal exposure. She absorbed that. So whoever hired the lawyer who approached him, they were already building this.
Six weeks ago they were already preparing for a scenario where I survived long enough to end up somewhere they needed to find me. Yes. But six weeks ago I was still in that house. I wasn’t anywhere they needed to find me yet. She looked at the window, at the light outside it. They were preparing for the possibility that the poison didn’t work.
They had a contingency. Ronan said nothing. This is not Grant, she said. Not a question. Grant is part of it. He’s not the architect. She thought about the name she’d seen on Sergey’s wall through the half-open office door when she’d passed it on the way to the bathroom an hour ago. One name she hadn’t recognized, one name that sat above the others on the wall in a way that suggested hierarchy.
Celeste Vay, she said. Ronan looked at her sharply. I saw your whiteboard. She kept her voice even. I don’t know that name, but I know the executive committee vote 14 months ago. I know who seconded Holloway’s motion on the proxy restructure. It was a new board member, someone Grant had pushed through on a skills and diversity basis 2 years before.
She stopped. I never looked into her properly. She was quiet, competent, kept her head down in meetings. She’s been with Holloway Capital for 4 years, Ronan said. She’s been his partner in every sense for at least three. The room shifted slightly. The way rooms shift when you receive information that reorganizes the past into a different shape.
