Chapter 104 Meeting

Chapter 104 Meeting
The club sat on a quiet street in the northern district. No signage. No visible entrance staff. A door that looked like part of the wall until you knew where to look.

Cael's contact had given me the knock sequence.

I used it.

A man let me in without speaking and led me through a corridor that smelled like old wood and something expensive burning in a fireplace somewhere deeper in the building, and then through a second door into a private room with a table and two chairs and a window that looked out onto a courtyard nobody could see into from the street.

Cy was already there.

He looked exactly as he had in the committee room footage I'd reviewed at the estate, the same self-possession. A glass of something on the table in front of him, untouched.

He looked at me.
"Liam Vaelthor," he said.
"Cyrus Rothmere," I said.
I sat down.

He studied me for a moment, taking his time with it, his eyes moving across my face and my hands and the watch on my wrist.

"You look like your grandfather," he said.
"You knew him?"
"Everyone in a certain circle knew Aldric," he said. "Whether they admitted it later depended on which way things fell." He picked up his glass and set it down again without drinking. "You killed Victoria Vanderholt."
"Yes."
"She was formidable."
"She was," I said. "She was also responsible for things that required answering for."
"Most formidable people are." He looked at me. "What do you want, Mr. Vaelthor."
"You know what I want."
"I want to hear you say it."
"Adrian," I said. "I want him finished. Legally, illegally, doesn’t matter. I want everything he built dismantled and I want him unable to rebuild it." I held his gaze. 

"You've been trying to do the same thing for years through channels that keep almost working. I'm offering you what those channels were missing."
"A Vaelthor claim," he said.
"A verified Vaelthor claim with colonial legal authority that supersedes Men of Moon's entire institutional foundation," I said. "Combined with your documentation on Adrian's operations and your existing High Ground relationships, we remove every legal protection he has before he can trigger his own countermeasures."

Cy was quiet for a moment, turning his glass slowly on the table.

"And what do you want from me in return," he said.
"Your documentation. Your High Ground votes. Your legal resources pointed at Men of Moon's Earth operations simultaneously with whatever we do on the Moon side." I paused. "And when it's done, you walk away from the Dravenor holdings."

He looked at me.

"That's what I'm paying," he said. "Not what I'm receiving."
"You receive Adrian's destruction," I said. "Which is what you've been trying to buy for years without being able to afford it."

He almost smiled.

"You negotiate like Aldric," he said. "He was always direct past the point where most people became diplomatic."
"I learned from his recordings," I said.
"They preserved his character well." Cy set his glass down. "Alright. I'm prepared to—"

The door opened.

Adrian Rothmere walked in.

He was alone. No security visible, though I knew without looking that the corridor outside had changed in the last thirty seconds. He wore the same kind of suit he always wore in every photograph and footage I'd seen of him, dark, perfectly fitted, nothing about his appearance that demanded attention and nothing that permitted you to look away either.

He pulled the third chair from against the wall, placed it at the table between me and Cy.

He looked at me.

"Liam," he said.

The sound of my real name in his mouth was something I hadn't prepared for.

"Adrian," I said.

He looked at Cy.

"You called me the moment his message arrived," Adrian said to Cy. 

Cy said nothing, which was its own confirmation. I looked at Cy across the table.

He met my eyes without flinching, which I supposed was honest at least. He'd never pretended to be trustworthy. I'd known walking in that he wasn't. What I hadn't accounted for was how quickly he'd move, or that Adrian would come himself rather than sending people.

"You came personally," I said to Adrian.
"I wanted to see you," he said. "Reports and footage don't capture everything." He looked at me with the same attention Cy had shown but different in quality, more thorough, less interested in what I looked like and more interested in something underneath it. "You have Aldric's eyes."
"So I've been told."
"He was a remarkable man," Adrian said. "I regret the necessity of what happened to your family. I want you to know that."

The room was very still.

"You regret it?" I said.
"I do." He said. "It was necessary for what we were building and I made the decision understanding what it cost. Regret and necessity are not mutually exclusive."

I looked at him across the table, this man who had said my grandfather's name with something that sounded like genuine respect and had ordered his death with the same calm he brought to everything else.

"Why are you here," I said.
"Because you and Cy were about to make a plan that would cost both of you more than it needed to," he said. "And because I have a proposal that serves everyone in this room better than the alternative."
"The alternative being?" I said.
"You attempting to kill me," he said. "Which you came to Earth to do, and which would be considerably more difficult than Victoria was, and which would leave the Moon in a power vacuum that would take years to stabilize." He folded his hands on the table. "I'm offering something else."

I looked at him. At the man who had killed my parents.  

"Talk," I said.