79

79
SILAS'S POV

I was in the middle of reviewing contracts when Pete came in.

He did not knock. He never knocked, we had an understanding about that, if Pete was coming through a door without being called it meant something needed my attention and the polite thing to do was get to it quickly. 

I had trained him that way years ago and he had never once abused it.

I did not look up from the papers immediately. I finished the paragraph I was reading, noted the clause I wanted amended in the margin, and then set the pen down and looked at him.

He was standing just inside the doorway with his hands in front of him and his face doing the careful neutral thing it did when he had information he was not entirely sure how I was going to receive.

I had seen that face many times over the years.

"Talk," I commanded.

Pete stepped further into the room. "Perry made a move today."

"What kind of move."

He paused for just a fraction of a second. Long enough for me to notice it.

"He met with someone," Pete said. "Private location. A property about forty minutes outside Rome. One of our contacts in his network flagged it about an hour ago."

I reached for my glass and leaned back in my chair. "Who did he meet."

Pete looked at me steadily. "Ulla Adel."

I did not move.

The glass stayed in my hand halfway to my mouth and I looked at Pete and the room went very quiet around me for a moment.

Ulla Adel… A name I thought I wouldn't hear again.

I set the glass down on the desk.

Pete was watching my face with  careful attention of a man who had spent years learning to read it and knew that the absence of reaction was sometimes the most significant reaction of all.

The fact that my hand had not gone back to the glass. The particular quality of the silence I was sitting in.

"How long was the meeting," I said.

"Approximately two hours," Pete said. "They arrived separately and left separately. No one else was present as far as we could determine."

"Where is she staying."

"Rome. A serviced apartment in Prati. She has been here for four days." Pete paused. "She did not come for a holiday, boss."

I turned my chair slightly toward the window and looked out at the city for a moment. 

Ulla Adel… Four years since I had heard that name spoken out loud in a room I was in and I had let her go because letting her go had been the correct decision and I had made it without hesitation.

I had not expected her to come back. Heck, I had not expected Perry Cullen to be resourceful enough to find her.

I turned back to Pete. "What do we know about what was said," I said.

"Nothing specific yet," Pete said. “We know they met, we know the duration, we know they arrived and left without incident. That is the full picture right now."

"I need more than that."

"I know."

"I need to know exactly what she told him," I said. "Every detail. What she gave him, what she held back, what her read of him was when she walked out of that room." I looked at Pete directly. "Can you get that?"

Pete thought about it for a moment as he rarely needed long moments because he was already thinking three steps ahead of most conversations by the time they started.

"I can get to someone close to her," he said. "It will take a day. Maybe two."

"One," I ordered.

"One," he agreed, without arguing about it. That was another thing I valued about Pete. He did not argue about timelines, instead he just adjusted.

"And Perry," I said. "What is his reading after the meeting? Did he look shaken, did he look like a man who just got what he came for, what was his energy when he left?"

"Contact said he looked settled," Pete said carefully. "Like a man who had just been handed something he intended to use."

I nodded slowly. So she had given him something.

The question was how much.

Ulla knew things about me that most people did not know. She had been close to me during a year when I had been less careful than usual about what I allowed people to see, and she had seen things that I had not fully registered she was seeing at the time. 

Not careless, I was never careless, but younger in the way that affected judgment in small ways that only became visible in retrospect.

She had left Rome knowing enough to be dangerous.

Whether she had held onto that knowledge intact across four years and was now prepared to hand all of it to a man like Perry Cullen was something I needed to know immediately.

"Pete," I called.

"Boss."

"This does not leave this room," I said. "Not the meeting, not the name, nothing. You tell no one else on the team anything beyond what they need to do their specific job."

Pete nodded. "Understood."

"And Imogen," I said. "She does not hear this name. Not until I know exactly what we are dealing with."

Pete was quiet for a second. "And if she asks where you are when you go to deal with it."

"She will not ask," I said. "And if she does, she knows I have business that I do not discuss in detail."

Pete looked like he wanted to say something about that and decided against it, which was the correct decision.

"One day," I said again.

"One day," he confirmed.

He left the room as quietly as he had entered it and I sat alone with the contracts on the desk in front of me and the untouched glass of whiskey beside them.

Ulla Adel, I had not loved her. I wanted to be precise about that, at least in my own head. 

What I had felt for her had been something real but it had not been love. It had been closeness and familiarity and the particular comfort that came from having someone who understood the world you operated in. But I had been less guarded than I should have been. And less guarded meant she had things.

I pulled the glass toward me finally and drank from it slowly and thought about Perry sitting somewhere in this city right now feeling like he had just found the thing that was going to change the direction of this war.

He was not entirely wrong but he did not understand what he had just done by going to her.

He had not just found a source, he had just shown me exactly how desperate he was, exactly which direction he was moving in, and exactly which thread I needed to cut before he could pull it any further.

I set the glass down and picked up my phone.

There was work to do.