What He Wants

What He Wants
They read the email six times between them.

“He is not threatening you,” Rafael said.

“No,” Sorina said.

“He congratulated you.”

“Yes.”

“That is worse,” Rafael said.

Yara agreed with him, though she did not say so out loud. A threat would have been simpler. A threat could be answered. This was something else — a man announcing that he knew the private, ordinary, entirely legitimate thing she had done three days ago, and framing it as good news.

I think we have more in common than either of us has been told.

“He knows about your parentage,” Yara said.

“He knows something,” Sorina said. “That line could mean several things.”

“It means he has read the same files Fell kept,” Yara said. “Marco could not have given him that. Diego could not have. That came from the Matis side of the structure.”

Sorina looked at the screen again.

“He is not wrong, either,” she said quietly. “That is what makes it effective. We do have things in common. We both grew up adjacent to something we were never allowed inside. We were both placed by men who never claimed us. He is not inventing a connection. He is pointing at one that actually exists.”

“Which is why you are not going to meet him,” Rafael said.

Sorina did not answer.

Yara looked at her.

“Sorina,” she said.

“I heard him,” Sorina said.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Kira’s assessment, when they called her, was immediate.

“Do not meet him,” she said. “Not because he will hurt you. Because he will not.”

“Explain that,” Yara said.

“Anton does not use force as a first instrument. He never has. In eleven years I watched him resolve situations that would have taken anyone else a weapon, and he did it by sitting across from someone and being extremely reasonable for a long time.” A pause. “He is persuasive in a way that does not feel like persuasion. He asks good questions. He listens properly. He tells you true things about yourself that nobody has said out loud before, and by the time you notice what is happening you have already given him something.”

“That is what he did to us,” Yara said. “In the archive room.”

“Yes,” Kira said. “And you are professionals who were actively suspicious of him. Your sister has spent her entire life being unclaimed by the people who made her. He is going to sit down across from her and offer to be the first person who says out loud that she was owed something.” Her voice hardened. “That is the most dangerous thing anyone could offer her, and he knows it, which is why he is offering it.”

Sorina had been listening in silence.

“You are describing me as though I am easy to move,” she said.

“I am describing you as a human being,” Kira said. “I would not send myself into that room either, and Anton has known me since I was nineteen.”

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Sorina thought about it for two days.

She did not discuss it. She went to work, submitted her intelligence summary, spent Wednesday afternoon at the flower shop repotting a tray of seedlings that did not urgently need repotting. On Thursday she sat in on her first seminar at Columbia and found, to her surprise, that she enjoyed it enormously — twenty-two-year-olds arguing badly about network theory, Reyna letting them argue, Daniel Park in the back row catching her eye once when a student said something genuinely clever.

Afterward Daniel walked out with her.

“You were quiet,” he said.

“I was listening.”

“You were counting exits,” he said. “For the first eleven minutes. Then you stopped and started actually listening, which was interesting to watch.”

Sorina glanced at him. “Do you always narrate people to themselves?”

“Only when I think they have not been narrated accurately before,” he said. Then, more carefully: “That was probably too much. I apologise.”

“It was not,” she said.

They walked a little way in silence.

“Can I ask you something professional,” Sorina said.

“Yes.”

“If someone who had reason to be your enemy sent you an invitation to meet, and everyone around you said do not go, and you knew they were right — what would decide it for you?”

Daniel thought about it for a moment. He did not ask who or why, which she noticed and appreciated.

“Whether I was going to hear something or say something,” he said. “If I wanted to hear what they had, I would find another way to get it, because the room would cost me more than the information was worth.” He paused. “If I needed to say something to their face — if there was a thing that would sit in me for the next decade unsaid — then I would go. But I would be honest with myself about which one it was.”

Sorina was quiet.

“Which one is it,” Daniel said.

“I do not know yet,” she said.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

She told Yara that evening.

“I am not going to meet him,” she said. “Not because you asked me not to. Because Kira is right about what he would offer and I do not trust myself to sit across from it and not want it.”

Yara let out a breath she had not realised she was holding.

“Thank you,” she said.

“But I am going to answer him,” Sorina said.

“Sorina—”

“One line,” Sorina said. “Because if I say nothing, he keeps writing. And every email he sends will land in a life I am trying to build cleanly.” She paused. “I want to close the door myself.”

Yara looked at her for a long moment.

“All right,” she said.

Sorina wrote it that night. One sentence.

Whatever we have in common, I built my life out of it and you built a claim — that is the whole difference, and it is not one you can talk me out of.

She sent it.

The reply came four minutes later.

Two words.

So did Kira.

And then, thirty seconds after that, a photograph — Kira Matis, taken that afternoon, boarding a plane.