Chapter 68 A WARNING FROM REEVES

Chapter 68 A WARNING FROM REEVES
NOVA'S POV

I had been sitting at that kitchen table since five in the morning with the Castellano card face down in front of me, and I still had not touched it again.

Elias sat across from me with both hands wrapped around his mug, the tea inside it long cold.

He had come downstairs, seen me already dressed and already at the table, and just pulled out the chair across from me then sat down without making it into anything.

He had been watching me ever since.

I dragged my thumb along the edge of the card without flipping it over. Back and forth. The same small useless motion I had probably been doing for the past twenty minutes without noticing until Elias's eyes dropped to my hand.

I pulled my hand back into my lap.

"I'm thinking." I kept my eyes on the card.

"You've been thinking since midnight." Elias lifted his mug toward his mouth, stopped halfway, and put it back down on the table harder than he meant to. "At some point thinking just becomes sitting somewhere with your chest too tight to breathe properly."

"And you would know the difference exactly?" I finally looked up at him.

He gave me a look across the table that meant he was choosing not to answer that, so I pushed the card toward him instead.

He took it and read it again even though he had already read it four times since last night.

I watched his jaw tighten along the side while he read, that small muscle doing that thing it always did when he was holding something back.

He read it all the way through, put it back between us, and looked at it sitting there between our mugs.

"He signed it himself." I pulled the card back toward me.

"Yeah." Elias kept his eyes on the card for a moment before looking up at me. "Which means he's done waiting for Matthias to bring you to him and he's decided to step in front of it himself." He leaned forward on the table. "That means he's either very confident right now or he's running out of time, and I honestly cannot figure out which one is worse for us."

"I didn't say it was good." I turned the card face down again. "I said I was going in anyway."

Elias opened his mouth.

My phone buzzed against the table and we both looked at it at the same time.

Six o'clock exactly.

I picked it up before it could buzz twice and put it on speaker between us.

"Miss Sinclair." Reeves's voice came through the speaker and I could tell from the way he sounded that he had been awake for a long time already. "Saturday is workable. But the conditions are not something I can adjust and I need you to understand that before we go any further."

"Go ahead." I kept both hands flat on the table and looked at Elias across from me.

"You go in exactly the way Castellano planned it. Nothing on the surface changes. You arrive at the time written on that card, you walk into that private dining room, you sit across from him and you let him run the meeting the way he intended to run it."

Something shifted on his end, papers moving around. "The moment he suspects that meeting is anything different from what he set up himself, we lose the recording and we potentially lose you. I need you to understand that those two things matter equally to me."

"I understand." I kept my eyes on Elias across the table.

"The wire gets fitted on Saturday afternoon. My people will come to the estate and it takes around twenty minutes. You'll have time to get comfortable with it before you leave for the club."

I heard more movement on his end. "You'll have an earpiece the whole time you're in that room. I'll be on the other end of it. If anything inside that room starts feeling wrong before it actually goes wrong, you use the exit word and you walk out of there. You don't stand around waiting to see how it develops."

"What's the exit word?" Elias leaned forward toward the phone on the table.

"That gets confirmed Saturday when we fit the wire." Reeves did not move on that. "I don't put exit words in phone calls."

"Fair enough." Elias sat back in his chair.

"Miss Sinclair." Something in Reeves's voice changed direction slightly.

"I want you to understand something specific about Castellano before you sit across from him. He is not going to threaten you. He's going to be reasonable and he is going to make accepting his offer feel like the only logical thing a sensible person would do." He stopped for a moment. "That is harder to push back against than a direct threat. A threat you can reject outright. Reasonableness makes you start questioning your own judgment."

I looked at the card on the table in front of me.

"I will be careful." I picked the card up and held it between two fingers.

"Good. My team will confirm the Saturday arrangements by tomorrow morning. Until then nothing changes on your end. You go to work, you keep responding to Matthias the way you have been, and you give Castellano absolutely no reason to think anything about his plan has shifted." He stopped. "Are we clear?"

"We're clear." I put the card back down on the table face down and pushed it away from me.

The call ended.

I sat there with the phone in my hand before putting it back down next to the card.

Elias had his arms crossed over his chest and he was looking somewhere past my shoulder at the kitchen wall behind me. His jaw was still doing that thing.

"Reasonable and patient." He brought his eyes back to my face.

"I heard him for the first time."

"And you're still going in there." He was not asking anymore. He was just saying it out loud like he needed to hear it take up space in the room.

"Nothing he said changed anything." I held his gaze across the table. "I was going before he called and I'm going now."

Elias looked at me for a long moment with something sitting behind his eyes that I was not going to look at directly right now because looking at it directly would make it harder to keep my own face where it needed to be.

He got up without saying anything else, took both our mugs to the sink, and poured his cold tea away. He stood at the counter with the kettle in his hand and his back to me.

"Then we need to tell Callum." He turned the tap on to fill the kettle.

"I know." I straightened up in my chair.

"He's not going to like it." He turned the tap back off.

"I know that too." I put my hand flat over the card.

Elias turned around and leaned against the counter looking at me across the kitchen.

"He's going to go very quiet and ask very specific questions." He looked at me with something between worry and acceptance sitting on his face. "And then he's going to go somewhere by himself and not be quiet at all about it. That's just how he handles things he can't control."

I almost smiled because it was so completely accurate that there was nothing to add to it.

The kettle started heating up on the counter behind him.

And then from upstairs came the sound of footsteps moving toward the stairs. Heavy and already completely awake.

Elias looked up at the ceiling and then back at me.

"That's him." He pushed off the counter.

I put my hand flat over the Castellano card and straightened up in my chair.

The footsteps hit the bottom stair.

"Let me tell him." Elias took a step toward the kitchen door.

I shook my head and kept my hand flat on the card.

"I will." I looked at the kitchen door as it swung open.