We'll Talk Tomorrow

We'll Talk Tomorrow
POV: Felix
She was going to be the death of me. Not Martin, not the compound or the timeline or the ongoing problem of a half-brother who had built his empire in my blind spots.
Selina, in the blue dress, walking through my study on her way to the garden at seven in the evening while I sat at my desk trying to maintain the composure of a man who had decided to be patient and finding that decision considerably more difficult to sustain than it had appeared when I made it.
I was a man accustomed to outcomes. I set objectives and I pursued them and the pursuit produced results, not always quickly but reliably, because I was willing to apply whatever the situation required for as long as the situation required it.
That was how I had operated for twenty years and it had served me well enough in every context I had encountered it in. Every context except this one. This one had its own rules.
She walked out of the kitchen while I was mid-sentence on the second morning and I stood at the kitchen counter and looked at the doorway she had disappeared through and I thought very specific thoughts that I will not be writing down about patience as a concept and its various limitations.
On the third day she wore the blue dress. I am not going to describe what that did to my composure except to say that whatever it did, I managed not to show it, which represents one of the more significant achievements of the past several weeks.
Marco came into the study that evening and looked at my face and had the professional wisdom not to comment on whatever he saw there.
"Dante's team has new movement at the north address," he said.
"Tell me."
He told me. The movement was consistent with Martin managing a supply chain, external contacts visiting the building's perimeter at intervals that suggested scheduled meetings rather than casual traffic.
It was the behavior of a man maintaining operations, which meant he had not yet concluded that the disruption to his timeline required him to accelerate. The compound had not been delivered.
Strack was in formal custody and had been communicating with Martin's line through a protocol my tech team was managing, maintaining the appearance of an ongoing arrangement while we built the evidentiary structure around it.
Martin was waiting for his moment. His moment had not come because his specific conditions for it had not been met. What conditions.
I had been thinking about this during the patient hours, the hours when I was not thinking about the blue dress or the way Selina walked through rooms or the specific quality of being in the same house as someone who had decided to make the space between you into a statement.
Martin's conditions for the compound delivery were not purely operational. They never had been with Martin. Everything he did had a layer beneath the visible one, a purpose that the visible action served while also serving itself.
The compound would be delivered when Selina had served her purpose as leverage and taunting and the specific torture of having Felix Carano's most significant vulnerability within arm's reach while also being, for reasons Martin had engineered, completely inaccessible to him.
He was watching us...
The note on the car. The flowers. The watch on the windowsill. He had been watching us this whole time and he was watching us still, and what he was watching was a man who wanted something he couldn't have, which was Martin's favorite kind of power.
Not the kind that came from having things yourself but the kind that came from controlling what other people couldn't have. He was going to wait until he could see it clearly enough to enjoy it.
Which meant the clock was not running toward a date or a delivery window. It was running toward a moment.
And I was sitting in my study being expertly denied access to that moment by a woman in a blue dress who was making me sweat every minute of it and was, I was fairly certain, entirely aware of the effect she was producing and had made peace with producing it.
She was punishing me...
I understood this. I had earned it, specifically and in detail, and the punishment was fair by any measure I applied.
She had been controlled and managed and bullied, I could not look at Amaya flinching when she first saw me in the petrol station and not understand what I had made myself in Selina's life and in the lives of the people connected to her.
She was taking back the control she could take back in the ways available to her, which were currently limited to walking out of rooms and wearing that dress and making me explain myself to her retreating back.
It was working...
I was approximately four days from losing what remained of my patience and doing something either significantly right or significantly wrong, and I was not yet certain which it would be.
Amaya came through the study at eight that evening, which was unusual enough that I looked up.
She stopped in the doorway and looked at me with the direct, assessing gaze she had used on me from the moment I met her in the petrol station, the gaze of someone who was evaluating rather than simply observing and was not going to pretend otherwise.
"She'll listen tomorrow," she said. I looked at her.
"I'm telling you because I think you're about to do something impatient and I'd like you not to." She paused.
"Tomorrow. She told me. You'll get your chance to have a meaningful conversation with her."
I looked at this woman who had flinched away from me in a petrol station three days ago and was now standing in my study delivering intelligence about the person she was closest to in the world, and I thought about what that cost and what it meant and what it required me to be in response.
"Thank you," I said.
She nodded once, the crisp, uncommitted acknowledgment of someone who was conveying information rather than offering alliance, and left the study. I sat back in my chair.
Tomorrow...
I could hold the patience together for one more day. I had held it for three. One more was achievable. I would go after Martin, I would end this thing, I would lay out the entire shape of what I had discovered and what it meant, and she would hear it.
Whatever came after that would be whatever she decided it was. But I needed her to hear it first.
I looked at the security rotation logs on my desk and the Dante update and Elsa's file at the edge of the desk and the ongoing architecture of everything I was building toward. I thought about a woman somewhere upstairs who had decided, apparently, that tomorrow was the day she would let me explain.
One more day.
I
could manage one more day.
Probably.