Ryan had faced scary monts.
Even just days ago he’d sat down at a thirty thousand dollar poker table having never played a hand in his life. He’d watched his girlfriend get engaged to his boss in front of a room full of people and walked out with his head up.
He’d faced worse.
And yet standing in front of his bathroom mirror at 7:30 on a Monday morning in a fitted suit, he couldn’t locate a single mont in recent mory where he’d felt this specific kind of scared.
He looked at himself.
The suit was charcoal, well-cut, one of the things he’d bought in the weeks since the money started moving. His hair was actually styled for once — he’d spent twelve minutes on it, which was eleven more than his usual approach. He looked at his own face and had the strange experience of not imdiately recognizing what he saw. It wasn’t that anything was different exactly, but because he’d spent so little ti looking properly that the face in the mirror was almost new information.
He looked, he thought, ’like soone who had things together.’
He wondered if that was just how things felt now, or if it had always been there and he’d spent three years at ridian too tired and too beaten down to notice.
He took a breath. Let it out.
Took another.
He picked up his phone from the counter.
Two texts.
The first from Diana, sent yesterday evening. The office address, the floor, a ti. Without any extra or pleasantries, just the information required. He read it once and confird the details against what he’d written in the notes on his laptop.
The second from the unknown number.
He looked at it.
*We are onto you Russo. It’s only a matter of ti.*
He still hadn’t responded. He’d been doing the thing he knew wasn’t a strategy — hoping it would resolve itself if he didn’t engage with it, the sa way you ignored a noise in the wall and hoped it was nothing. It wasn’t a strategy. It was avoidance he masked as patience.
But he didn’t have a response. And sending the wrong thing to whoever this was could be worse than sending nothing.
He put the phone in his jacket pocket and picked up the briefcase from beside the door.
It was new. Leather, dark brown, simple. Sophie had told him to get it two weeks ago when he’d ntioned a planned eting and he’d ordered it that evening. It held his laptop, the printed deck he’d put together over the weekend, and Danny’s technical overview, which Iralis had reviewed and annotated in the margins in her small precise handwriting.
He looked at the apartnt one more ti.
Then he left.
---
The cab ride took twenty-two minutes.
The driver didn’t talk, which Ryan was grateful for. He sat in the back and went through the pitch in his head — not word for word, he’d learned enough from watching people present badly to know that word for word ant you fell apart the mont sothing went off script.
He went through the structure. The problem, the solution, the market, the ask. The IRS problem underneath all of it that he couldn’t say out loud and had to solve through the shape of the eting rather than direct conversation.
The cab stopped.
Ryan paid, got out, and stood on the pavent.
The building was the kind to exist in clusters in this part of Midtown — glass and steel, high and clean, the lobby visible through the front doors as a large quiet space with marble floors and the particular lighting that expensive comrcial buildings used to communicate that what happened inside was serious and worth the address.
He walked in.
The security desk took his na, made a call, issued a visitor badge with efficiency of a process that had been run thousands of tis. The elevator was fast and quiet.
Forty-seventh floor.
The doors opened.
The space was large, open, and almost completely silent — silence that ca from good construction and the deliberate arrangent of a workplace where people understood that noise was a form of disorder.
The flooring was pale hardwood, the walls mostly glass, and what furniture existed was minimal and intentional. A few people moved at desks in the peripheral spaces, heads down, unbothered by the elevator opening.
The woman behind the reception desk looked up before Ryan had taken three steps. She stood imdiately, which told him she’d been expecting him and had been watching the elevator.
"Mr. Russo," she said. Statent, not question.
"Yes."
"Please follow ."
She walked him through the floor — past the open work area, past a glass-walled conference room where two people were looking at sothing on a screen, through a short corridor, to a door at the end of it.
She pushed it open.
The office was enormous.
Floor to ceiling windows on two sides, the city spread out beyond them in every direction. The desk at the far end was dark wood, large, completely clear except for a laptop, a phone, and the docunt Diana Lockridge was reading when they walked in.
She didn’t look up imdiately.
The secretary said, "Mrs. Lockridge. Mr. Russo is here."
Diana raised one finger without lifting her eyes from the page. The secretary gave Ryan a small nod and stepped back, pulling the door closed behind her.
Ryan walked to the chair across from the desk and stood in front of it.
He didn’t sit. She hadn’t offered it yet.
He looked at the room while he waited. The bookshelves along one wall — not decorative, actually used, the spines uneven and so of them flagged with paper. A whiteboard to the left covered in writing he couldn’t read from this distance. Two frad photographs on the windowsill, both facing away from him. On the desk, beside the docunt she was reading, a single coffee cup.
Diana finished the page, turned it over, and looked up.
She was exactly as he rembered from the gallery — sharp features, direct eyes, the composed authority of soone who had occupied rooms like this for long enough that the room felt like hers because it was. She was in a dark blazer, hair back, nothing about her appearance that wasn’t deliberate.
She looked at him the way she’d looked at the painting at the gallery. Like she was deciding sothing.
"Mr. Russo," she said. "You made so bold claims on the phone."
Her eyes stayed on his, steady and patient.
"I hope you don’t disappoint."
Ryan held her gaze.
"May I sit?" he said.
She gestured at the chair.
He sat down, placed the briefcase on the floor beside him, and opened it without rushing. He produced the printed deck — twelve pages, clean, no unnecessary design flourishes — and set it on the desk in front of her.
She didn’t look at it yet. Still looking at him.
"Tell ," she said. "Before I read anything. Tell what you’re making and why I should care. Two minutes."
Ryan closed the briefcase.
Two minutes.
He looked at Diana Lockridge.
And he started.
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