chapter 12
For a second, I forgot the reason I had come.
Not because he was handsome, though he was. It was something else. Something unnerving in the stillness of him, as if he had taught himself years ago to waste no motion that didn’t serve a purpose.
“Nora Whitfield,” he said. “This is unexpected.”
In my last life, I had met him after the fall. After my father was dead. After Whitfield Industries was already being stripped for parts. He had looked at me then like a witness looks at a burned house: too late to save it, but not too late to understand what happened.
Now his gaze was sharper, more curious.
“I need two things,” I said. “Discretion and an introduction.”
He gestured for me to sit. “That’s usually three things.”
I almost smiled.
“An introduction to someone who can quietly investigate an aviation accident,” I said. “And discretion about why.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “You’re asking about a crash that hasn’t happened.”
There it was.
The floor beneath me seemed to tilt.
I kept my face still with an effort so brutal it felt like tearing skin from muscle. “What did you say?”
Gideon watched me for a long moment. Then he came around the desk and sat across from me.
“In another life,” he said quietly, “you were harder to reach.”
The room went silent except for the pulse in my throat.
He remembered.