She chose the rooftop of the Aldervane Hotel.
Not anywhere that could be mapped in advance by a man who'd had twelve hours to prepare himself.
The Aldervane's rooftop garden was open to the public until noon. She arrived at eleven forty-five, took the table at the far north corner where the harbour spread out below like something spilled, and ordered tea she had no intention of drinking.
She wanted to see how he arrived.
He came through the rooftop door at eleven fifty-three — seven minutes early, which told her something — and found her without hesitation, which told her more. He crossed the space between them without looking at the other tables, without scanning the exits, without doing any of the performative threat-assessment that men in his supposed profession usually couldn't resist.
He already knew the exits.
He'd come early to learn them.
She filed that away and said nothing as he sat down across from her, and for a moment neither of them spoke. The harbour wind moved through the rooftop garden and somewhere below them Varenthia went about the business of its morning, indifferent and continuous.
"Unusual choice," he said, looking out at the water.
"I find unusual choices clarifying."
His eyes came back to her. Dark, steady, carrying that weight she'd noticed in the restaurant and still hadn't fully accounted for. In daylight he looked older than she'd first registered — not old, but lived-in, the way certain cities looked lived-in, like the interesting parts had come from surviving something.
She opened the folder Marco had prepared and set it on the table between them.
"Consulate contract," she said. "Eighteen months. No client named, no verifiable end date." She watched his face. "Explain it."
"Confidentiality clause. Standard for that kind of work."
"Who negotiated the clause?"
"A lawyer in Northport. She retired two years ago."
Conveniently, she thought. "And before the consulate."
"Corporate security. Freight and logistics companies mostly. The names are in the file."
"I've read the file." She turned a page without looking at it. "I'm asking you."
He recited four company names, dates, a supervisor at each. Clean, specific, delivered without the slight upward lilt of someone reaching for a rehearsed answer. Either it was true or he'd practiced it long enough that it had become indistinguishable from true.
She moved on.
"Why Varenthia."
"Work."
"There's work in Northport."
"Not the kind I wanted."
She studied him. "What kind did you want?"
Something shifted very slightly in his expression — not a crack, nothing as legible as that. More like a word being chosen carefully from among several. "The kind that's harder," he said. "Northport is quiet. The clients are easy. Nothing requires your full attention."
"And you need your full attention required."
He looked at her steadily. "Doesn't everyone?"
She almost said something then — caught it just behind her teeth and swallowed it back down. Because the answer was yes, and the reason she knew it so completely was not something she intended to hand to a stranger across a table on a hotel rooftop.
She turned another page.
"You have no family listed."
"No."
"No emergency contact."
"No."
She looked up. "Everyone has someone."
The wind moved between them. Down in the harbour a foghorn sounded, low and long, the city's habitual punctuation.
"Not everyone," he said. Quietly. Without weight, without performance, without the particular texture of a man inviting sympathy. He said it the way someone stated a fact they'd long since made peace with.
She felt it land somewhere it had no business landing.
She looked back down at the folder. Let two seconds pass, then three, giving nothing away because giving nothing away was the only thing she had ever been fully certain she could do.
"My last head of security worked for me for six years," she said. "He knew my schedule, my habits, my exits. He knew which rooms I trusted and which I didn't. He knew things about me that nobody else in my organisation knew." She closed the folder. "He's dead now."
Luca — Marco — held her gaze. "I heard."
"Then you understand what I'm telling you."
"You're telling me the position requires loyalty above competence."
"I'm telling you the position requires both, and I will know immediately if I'm receiving less than either." She let that settle. "I don't extend second chances. I don't negotiate. And I don't forgive." A pause, precise and deliberate. "Are we clear?"
"Clear," he said.
She stood, because the interview was over and she ended things when she chose to end them. Marco Vane stood a half second after her — not scrambling, not delayed, the exact appropriate beat of a man who understood hierarchy without being diminished by it.
She picked up the folder.
"One more thing," she said, not quite looking at him. "Last night, in the restaurant. You didn't have to step in."
She wasn't sure why she said it. She hadn't planned to.
"No," he agreed.
"So why did you."
A beat. The harbour wind. The distant sounds of Varenthia below them doing what it always did — conducting its beautiful, corrupt, endless business.
"Because you were outnumbered," he said. Simply. As if that were the entire answer. As if the calculation had been that clean and that immediate and had required nothing further.
She looked at him then. Really looked, the way she rarely allowed herself to look at people because looking meant showing that you were looking.
He was already watching the harbour. Profile sharp against the grey sky, that particular stillness about him that she recognised now as something internal rather than practised. The stillness of a man who had learned to be quiet inside a long time ago because the noise had become unbearable.
She knew that too.
She turned and walked to the door without another word, which was how she always left — first, and without looking back.
But the thing he'd said followed her down seventeen floors and out into the cold Varenthia morning and sat with her for the rest of the day like a stone in still water.
Because you were outnumbered.
No agenda. No angle. No ask.
Just that.
She didn't know what to do with it, which was the most unsettling thing of all.