Mia said nothing for long enough that Dario became uncertain whether he was still needed in the room or had been forgotten.
Then she stood, slowly, and walked to the window, her window, the same east-facing one she always returned to when she needed to think, and she looked out at the street below, where the evening was beginning its gradual work of replacing the light with something cooler and less forgiving.
Seron.
Of everything she had anticipated, of every configuration of threat and competition and opposition she had mapped and prepared for, she had not prepared for this.
Not because she had underestimated Violet, she had not made that particular mistake in years, but because this was not merely competitive.
This was architectural. Violet was not trying to beat her. Violet was trying to build something that would outlast the beating, something with a name attached to it, a successor, a continuity that would make everything Mia built look temporary by comparison.
