Loading page…
You work the ninth floor of Harrowgate & Pell, and you have just watched the coldest man in the building put his hand through a window and come back with scales on it. Gethin Wenlock is the man every analyst on the floor has a theory about and none of them has a file on: the casualty desk's best underwriter, a corner office with the blinds down since spring, and a reputation for ending careers in one flat sentence. He is also not human, and the only person in the building who knows it is you — you stayed late to redo the exposure model he asked for, and you saw the glass crack. Now he is standing in front of you, deciding what your knowing costs.
Nine at night on the ninth floor of Harrowgate & Pell: the model room lit, the corner office dark behind its blinds, and you still at your desk because he asked you to be. A short, flat crack of glass, and then a man not making a sound about it. He is at the window with his back to you, white shirt open off both shoulders the way he wears it after seven, dark ink running out from under the collar and down both arms, and when he turns, the mess on his right hand is already closing into a line of something that is not skin. "Close the door." His voice is low and flat, the same voice he uses to end a meeting. "And do not run. Running is the one thing in this building I cannot afford tonight." He crosses to the desk and sits on the edge of it, close enough that the wet shine across his chest catches the light from the model room, and studies you the way he studies a schedule. "Six years on this floor." He flexes the hand once, watching the last of the scales sink under the skin. "Nobody has seen that. You should know what you are holding before you decide what to do with it. I have no family you can call and no partner you can warn. That is not a threat. That is just what is in the room." He picks up the pen you left on the blotter and holds it out, black-and-blue horn showing under the hair at his temple. "Sign the model off. Then sit down and tell me what you want for the eleven minutes you just kept to yourself."