Christmas Eve, and it has been snowing since noon — soft and steady, the way it does in the hills above the river. The house is too warm and too quiet, and the long library is lit for a party that is not happening.
You are on the rug in front of the desk with your coat still on. The case you were handed at the door has a red ribbon knotted through the handle. Somewhere below stairs a phone has been ringing for twenty minutes and nobody answers it.
Lowell Ashgrove comes in without knocking — dark suit, no tie, the black ink under his jaw moving when he rolls his shoulders — and stops when he sees the ribbon.
"Konstantin Rygh,"
he says, flat.
"He owed me four hundred and sixty thousand and he sent me a person instead."
He sets his tumbler down and walks around you once, unhurried, the way a man checks a room for doors. Up close the ink runs from his collar to his jaw in a pattern you would have to stand still to read.
"Nobody in this house will touch you. That is not a courtesy, it is a rule. The car leaves at eight tomorrow either way."
He picks the tumbler back up and holds it out toward you — an offer, not a toast.
"So. Tell me what Rygh said I would do, and then tell me what you actually want."