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SILAS'S POV

Pete had the address by the following morning.

A serviced apartment in Prati, third floor, corner unit. She had been renting it for five days under her own name which told me either she was not afraid or she had decided that being afraid was no longer a useful way to spend her energy.

Pete had stood in the front of the car with his arms folded and his jaw set and given me the look he gave me when he disagreed with a decision but had already calculated that arguing about it was not going to change anything.

"I will be outside the door," he argued.

"You will be in the car," I replied.

He had not responded to that but he had moved, which was the same thing.

I took the stairs when I got to the building. Not because I was trying to be quiet, I just preferred stairs. They gave you a few extra seconds and a few extra seconds were always useful before a conversation you had not had in four years.

I knocked on the door of the corner unit.

There was a pause. Long enough that I knew she had looked through the peephole and was now standing on the other side deciding something.

Then the door opened.

Ulla Adel had changed her hair. It had been longer when I knew her, dark and long past her shoulders. Now it was shorter and pushed back from her face. 

She looked at me with those pale eyes and her chin was levelled and her expression was the composed controlled thing I remembered. Nothing in her face moved when she saw me. She had prepared for this.

"Silas," she sneered.

"Ulla," I said.

She stepped back and held the door open as I walked in.

The apartment was neat. Minimal. A suitcase stood open near the wardrobe with things folded inside it that told me she had not fully unpacked, which meant she had not fully committed to being here, which also meant some part of her had known this was coming even before I knocked.

I stood in the center of the room and looked around it once and then looked at her.

She had her arms crossed, her chin was still levelled and she was looking at me like she had rehearsed this moment and was determined to get through it the way she had planned.

"I know why you are here," she said, her voice carrying the particular firmness of someone who had decided boldness was their best protection.

"Good," I replied. "Then we can skip the part where you pretend otherwise."

Something moved in her eyes but was quickly contained.

"I talked to Perry Cullen," she said directly, getting ahead of it the way people did when they thought admission might function as a kind of shield. "I told him things."

"I know," I remarked.

"I am not going to apologize for it." Her voice stayed steady. "You do not get to come here and expect an apology from me."

"I did not come for an apology," 

"Then what did you come for?” She questioned.

I looked at her for a moment without answering immediately. She was still holding herself well. The composure was real, not performed, which was one of the things I had always recognized about Ulla. 

She did not wear strength like it was a costume rather she had it, or she had had it once. What I was looking at now was something rebuilt from the pieces of the original and held together by determination rather than ease.

"I came to tell you what happens next," I announced.

She kept her chin level. "And what happens next?”

"The man you spoke to yesterday," I explained, "does not have the resources to protect you from the consequences of what you told him. He thinks he does but he does not.” I let out a small chuckle. “Within the next thirty days Perry Cullen is going to be finished in this city. His money will be inaccessible, his reputation will be in pieces, and anything he promised you in exchange for the information you gave him will be worth nothing."

She said nothing but her jaw moved slightly, a small tight shift that she could not entirely control.

"The two names you gave him," I continued. "The routing contact and the government official. Those men will know by tomorrow morning that their names were shared. They will know it came from you." I paused. "I will not have to do anything about that directly. They will do it themselves."

The color drained from her face. 

"Are you threatening me?" she requested. Her voice was still steady but something underneath it was starting to loosen at the edges.

"I am not threatening you," I replied. "I am telling you what is going to happen. A threat implies uncertainty about the outcome. I am not uncertain."

She stared at me and her lips parted slightly and closed again.

"You cannot just walk in here after four years and act like you own everything!" she yelled, and this time the boldness in her voice had a thin quality to it, like fabric pulled too tight over something that was close to breaking.

She uncrossed her arms and took a step toward me and something in her expression shifted.

"Four years, Silas," she stated, and her voice dropped lower but it became softer. "Four years and you walk in here  and you talk to me like I am just another problem you need to manage."

I kept my face still.

She took another step and she was close now, closer than the conversation required, and I could see the calculation behind it even as she made it, the decision to try a different kind of weapon since the boldness had not worked.

"Do you ever think about it?" she whispered as her scent filled the little space between us. "About us? About what it was like before you decided I was done?"

"Ulla…”

"Do not use that voice on me," she spat out. "That voice you use when you are dismissing something and I am not something you can dismiss."

She reached up and put her hand against my jaw and looked at me with those pale eyes and everything in them was complicated and real, the jealousy and the damage and the four years of something she had never fully put down.

Then she kissed me and I let it last exactly one second.

I took her wrist and moved her hand away from my face and stepped back.

She looked at me and something in her face crumpled before she could stop it. Then she pulled it back together and lifted her chin as her eyes went bright.

"So it is true," she retorted, her voice was tight. "The woman?”

I said nothing.

"She must be something extraordinary," Ulla said, and the word extraordinary came out with a bitterness she could not keep out of it no matter how hard she tried. "For you to actually look at someone that way. For you to bring someone into your actual life… into your penthouse." She let out a short sound that was not quite a laugh. "You never let me past the lobby."

"Ulla," I called her name again.

"What does she have," she said, and now her voice cracked slightly on the last word and she pressed her lips together hard and looked away from me at the wall and her throat moved as she swallowed. "What does she have that I did not have? That is all I want to know, Silas."

I looked at her standing there with her chin up, I thought about what to say and then I thought about Imogen and I did not have to think very hard about the answer.

But I did not give it to her.

Some answers were not mine to give and some questions deserved the dignity of not being answered at all.

"Stay away from Perry Cullen," I urged quietly. "That is the only thing I am asking of you. Stay away from him and stay out of this and you will be fine."

She looked back at me. "And if I do not?" 

"Then the things I told you about earlier become relevant," I said. "And I would prefer they did not."

She held my gaze for a long moment, then she turned away from me and walked to the window and stood there with her back to me and her arms wrapped around herself and looked out at the street below. She did not say anything else as I walked to the door and opened it.

"Silas," she said, without turning around.

I stopped.

"She is lucky," Ulla said quietly, to the window. "She does not even know how lucky she is."

I pulled the door shut behind me and walked down the stairs and out into the street and did not look back.

Pete was leaning against the car and had read my face when I came out the way he always did and opened the passenger door without a word.

We pulled out into traffic and drove for two minutes in silence before Pete spoke.

"How did it go," he murmured, his eyes on the road.

"The way it needed to," I shot back.