POV: Mia
He calls it a conversation.
Mia calls it what it is.
They sit across from each other at the long table in the meeting room — the one she found on her first day of mapping, with the screen on the wall and the chairs that cost more than her monthly rent. Dante has a single sheet of paper in front of him. She has nothing in front of her because she does not need paper to remember things and she wants him to know that.
He folds his hands on the table.
"While you are here," he begins, "there are three rules."
She waits.
"You do not leave this building without one of my people beside you. Not because I do not trust you. Because I cannot protect you outside these walls without preparation and Sable's men are actively looking." He says this like he is reading from a manual. Calm. Clear. No room for argument built into his tone. "If you need something from outside — clothes, medicine, anything — you tell me and I will have it brought in."
She nods once. Not agreeing. Just indicating she heard.
"You do not contact anyone from your previous life. No calls. No messages. No emails. Not your roommate, not your professors, not anyone." A pause. "I know that is hard. It is also non-negotiable. Every person connected to you is a potential thread Sable can pull."
Jana's face from the news broadcast flashes through Mia's mind. The crying. The tissue. She pushes it down.
"Third," Dante says. "You do not ask questions I have not indicated I am ready to answer. I will give you information in order, as it becomes relevant. Not because I am hiding things from you but because there is a sequence to this and pulling pieces out of order creates problems I cannot afford."
Mia looks at the paper in front of him. "Is that written down?"
"It is."
"Why?"
"Because I find that written terms prevent later disagreements about what was said."
She almost smiles at that. Almost. "And in exchange for all of this cooperation on my end?"
"You are safe. You are fed. You have access to most of this floor. You are not a prisoner." He meets her eyes steadily. "And I will finish what your father started."
The last part lands differently than the rest. Less like a term and more like a promise. She notices that.
She looks at him for a long moment across the table. He looks back. He has the kind of stillness that most people have to work at — the kind that comes from years of making sure nothing on your face gives anything away. She has seen cracks in it twice now. Tiny ones. Fast. But they were there.
She leans forward slightly.
"And what do you get out of this?"
The room is quiet.
Dante holds her gaze and for exactly three seconds — she counts them — he does not answer. It is not the pause of someone searching for words. It is the pause of someone deciding how much truth to put in them.
"I get what your father promised me," he says finally. "The evidence to finish Sable."
It is a good answer. It is a complete sentence. It answers the question on the surface and gives nothing underneath it away.
But the pause was three seconds long.
Mia files that away in the same part of her mind where she keeps everything important.
She sits back. "Fine."
"Fine," he repeats.
"I have one addition."
His expression does not change. "Go ahead."
"When you decide I am ready for the next piece of information," she says, "you come to me directly. Not through your men, not in a file left on a table. You sit down and you tell me yourself." She holds his gaze. "My father trusted you enough to die for what you were building together. The least you can do is look me in the eye when you tell me why."
Something moves across his face. Quick as a shadow, gone before she can name it.
"Agreed," he says.
He picks up the paper, folds it once, and slides it across the table to her. She picks it up and puts it in her pocket without reading it. She already memorized everything on it while he was talking.
She does not sleep again that night.
She lies on top of the covers and stares at the ceiling and thinks about Jana crying on camera and her father reading numbers to her when she was nine and the way Dante's jaw tightened when she asked what he got out of this.
At some point past midnight she gives up on lying still and goes to the kitchen.
She is standing at the counter eating crackers — the only thing she can find that does not require cooking and thought — when the kitchen light flicks on and she spins around with a cracker raised in her hand like a weapon.
The man in the doorway looks at the cracker. Looks at her. Raises both hands slowly in mock surrender.
"I come in peace," he says. "Also I come for the good crackers, which are on the second shelf, not the first. The ones you have are basically cardboard."
She stares at him.
He is younger than Dante. Same dark hair but worn differently — messier, easier. Same sharp jaw but his face does what Dante's does not, which is move. He is already halfway to smiling just standing there. He goes past her to the second shelf, finds a different box of crackers, and holds it out to her.
"Luca Reyes," he says. "Dante's brother. The better-looking one, obviously."
She takes the cracker box because she is still hungry. "Mia."
"I know." He pulls out the stool across from her and sits down like they have done this a hundred times. "He told me about you. Well. He told me your name and that you were here and that I should not bother you. Which felt like an invitation."
"That is the opposite of an invitation."
"Dante says do not do a lot of things. I find life more interesting when I apply some personal interpretation." He takes a cracker. "How are you actually doing? Not the version you give him where you look like nothing touches you. The actual version."
Mia blinks.
She opens her mouth to give him the same flat nothing she gives everyone.
And instead, for reasons she cannot fully explain, she says: "I feel like the world is happening without me and I am watching it through glass and nobody can hear me knock."
Luca is quiet for a second. Then he nods slowly. "That is the most honest thing anyone has said in this building in about three years."
Something loosens in her chest. Just slightly. Just enough.
"He is like that with everyone," Luca says, and she knows immediately who he means. "Not because he does not care. Because he cares so much that he turned it into a system. Rules and files and sequences. It is the only way he knows how to protect people without—" He stops. Tilts his head. "You know what, that is his thing to tell you. Not mine."
She smiles. A real one. Small, but real.
It is the first time she has smiled since her father died.
She almost feels guilty about it.
They eat crackers in comfortable silence for a few minutes. Then Luca says, casual as anything, like it is not the most shocking thing she will hear all week:
"For what it is worth. The ten million he bid at the auction?" He reaches for another cracker. "That was not the real number."
Mia goes still. "What?"
"There were four other serious bidders lined up for that night. Three of them got calls before the auction started." Luca meets her eyes. "Private calls. Very persuasive calls. The kind that come with enough money attached that people decide they are suddenly not interested in attending."
The air goes out of the room.
"He paid them off," she says slowly. "Before the auction. Before a single bid was called."
"Before you even walked in that room," Luca says quietly, "there was only ever going to be one person buying you."
The cracker in Mia's hand is completely forgotten.
Her mind is running very fast through one single question.
Why?
A man who wanted a witness would have let the auction run and bought her at the lowest possible price.
A man who just wanted leverage would not have cared who else was in the room.
A man who paid off three bidders before she ever walked through that door wanted something else entirely.
She just does not know yet what it is.