I looked at her for a long moment.
She meant it. Every word. This was not posturing for an audience because there was no audience. Hargrave had disappeared into the back bay and his assistant had found somewhere else to be, and Noel Stark was standing in a fabrication lab telling me she planned to publicly destroy me on Friday with the specific conviction of someone who had been saving this particular promise for a long time.
I ran the math on that.
Two days. She had known me for two days. You do not develop that kind of focused, personal investment in two days unless you are working from existing material.
Something clicked.
Short Stack.
I had called her Short Stack this morning and she had reacted like I had pulled a pin from something. Not just annoyance. Not the standard Noel Stark cold dismissal she applied to everything else I said. Something rawer. Something older.
