The most dangerous dinner in Manhattan was supposed to be my private joke,

The green glass desk lamp in the outer anteroom cast a low, emerald sheen over Eleanor Price’s mechanical keyboard. Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass partition, Lower Manhattan stretched out toward the harbor like a circuit board of amber fire and cold slate. It was 8:16 PM on a Thursday. The cleaning crews had already cleared the forty-first floor, yet Eleanor remained anchored to her station, cross-referencing three years of offshore shell company registrations against municipal real estate tax exemptions.

Her hands rested flat over the oak desk. They were pale, scrubbed clean with unscented castile soap, and completely devoid of rings, polish, or vanity.

"What time, Mr. Mercer?" she repeated.

Her voice was level, carrying the flat, frictionless cadence of a magistrate reading an uncontested land boundary. It possessed none of the breathless deference that junior executives adopted when standing before the mahogany doors of my corner office, nor did it carry the trembling hesitation of an employee realizing she was being led into a social slaughterhouse.

I stood three feet from her desk, my hands buried in the pockets of my charcoal wool trousers. The scent of Grant’s lingering bourbon clung to my lapel, heavy and sour against the sterile, air-filtered quiet of the floor.

"Eight o'clock sharp," I said, leaning an inch closer, searching for the crack in her composure. "The car will collect you at your apartment in Astoria. Black tie. The invitation specifies couture, but I assume you can find something appropriate on short notice."

"Appropriate," she echoed, her dark hazel eyes meeting mine through the glare of her wire-rimmed lenses. "Of course. Is there a specific color code the chairman prefers for decorative personnel?"

The jab was delivered without a drop of venom, so dry and clinical that it took my brain half a second to register the barb.

A faint, sharp grin pulled at the corner of my mouth. "Wear whatever you think matches the room, Miss Price. Just make sure you bring your notebook. Some of the men in that room speak in figures that require translation."

"I am familiar with their figures, Mr. Mercer," she said, her fingers dropping back to the home row of her keyboard with a decisive, rhythmic clack-clack-clack. "I process the political donation filings. Goodnight, sir."

I didn't turn away immediately. I watched her for five long seconds—the rigid cervical spine, the plain brown hair twisted into that utilitarian plastic clip, the drab charcoal cardigan buttoned up to her collarbone. She looked like a woman who lived on dry toast and municipal zoning codes, an invisible gear in a machine designed to grind down smaller men.

Ten thousand dollars, I thought, remembering the cold, ugly laughter Grant had left in my office. Grant is going to lose his shirt.

Yet as I stepped into the private express elevator and watched the brushed-bronze doors hiss shut, a cold, unfamiliar prickle of unease settled beneath my ribs.