Celeste's POV
After I'd tested to some extent that Jace could be useful, I took him into my study room. I locked the door and laid a folder of photographs across the monitor bank instead of a face. These were men I'd been circling for two years, men who'd been in that warehouse district the night Kane was killed.
"I want you to look at these and tell me if you recognize anyone." I told him. "I looked into your background; you spent a decade in rooms full of men like these. People who like being seen with a face like yours on their arms. I need to know if any of these belong to that world."
He looked at the photographs for a long moment before he looked back at me. "You're not keeping me for company."
"No." I told him plainly.
He went still. He knew the conversation had stopped being about them. "This is about the warehouse."
"No," I corrected him. "This is about the night one of my men was killed. Two years ago, in a building that looked considerably like the one we found you in. We have a date and a handful of faces from a security feed that only caught them at bad angles. You worked events where men like this liked to be seen. I want names."
He went through the folder slowly, and I watched him do it rather than the photographs themselves. I'd already memorized every face in that stack the way you memorize a wound. Twice he stopped on someone, said nothing, and moved on, which told me more than a name would have. I didn't push. A man rushed into a memory gives you what he thinks you want to hear. A man left alone with it eventually gives you the truth, because the truth is the only thing his mind actually knows how to produce without prompting.
"This one." He tapped a face near the bottom, third pass through. "I don't have a name. I know the room he stood in, and I know he made the man running it nervous, which nobody else in that business ever managed."
It wasn't a name. It was a thread, and I have built entire campaigns out of less. "Keep looking," I said. "We'll do this again tomorrow."
I didn't tell him why I needed it done quietly, or why Claire didn't yet know the specific shape of what I was building out of a photograph and a dead man's calling card. My sister knew Kane was dead, what she didn't know was that I'd found a living thread back to the man who put him there, and I hadn't decided yet how much of that thread I intended to let her hold.
~
I came back the following week with a second folder, and a third the week after that, and told myself each time it was simple efficiency, that a resource this useful was a resource worth cultivating properly, the way you'd sharpen a blade rather than let it dull from neglect. Jace never once asked why there was so much secrecy around the whole thing. I have wondered, since, whether he already understood the answer before I did, and simply had the good sense not to say so.
He was careful with what he gave me, always. Not withholding, exactly, I would have noticed withholding and ended the arrangement the moment I did.
He was precise, offering exactly as much certainty as he actually possessed and no more. With time, I found myself trusting his uncertainty more than I trusted most men's confidence. A man who tells you plainly what he doesn't know is a man who isn't lying to you about what he does.
I tried, once, to catch him in exactly that kind of confidence he didn't actually possess. I had learned, over years of running this house, that the surest way to know whether a source could be trusted under real pressure was to hand him a name that wasn't in any of his photographs at all and see whether he manufactured a memory to please me rather than admit he had nothing.
"This one," I said, tapping a face that belonged to no one connected to Kade at all, a man I'd invented for the purpose, plucked from an unrelated file and slipped into the stack without comment. "Look carefully."
He looked carefully. He looked for considerably longer than the other faces had required, which told me, even before he spoke, that he understood something was being asked of him beyond the ordinary question.
"I don't know him," he said finally. "And I don't think I'm supposed to. You're testing whether I'll invent something to keep you satisfied."
"Was I that obvious?"
"No," he said. "You were careful. But I've spent a lot of time telling directors exactly what they wanted to hear about a shot that wasn't working, because it was easier than admitting the shot was wrong. I know what it feels like from the other side of that particular test. I'd rather not be the kind of person who does it to you."
I did not tell him how rare an answer was. In a house where nearly everyone told me whatever they thought would keep them longest in my good graces. I filed it away instead, the way I filed everything I wasn't yet ready to examine too closely and let the evening continue as though I hadn't just learned something that mattered considerably more to me than any face in any folder.
Two nights after our conversation, I went to give him another file. When I opened the door I found him already watching it.
"You watch everything," I said, testing him.
"There's not much else to do." A pause, and then, easier than I expected from a man usually so careful with his words:
"Why do you never smile the way your sister does?"
The question took me by surprise, but I hid it under a mask of practiced indifference. I told him plainly, "Because smiling has never once gotten me anything I actually wanted."
I watched something shift behind his eyes, not pity, which I would have hated, but something closer to recognition, as though he'd braced for an easier answer and gotten a truer one instead. He considered that with more seriousness than the question deserved.
"That's the loneliest sentence I've heard since I got here," he said finally, quiet, without any of the practiced charm I still half expected from a man who used to make his living charming others.
I didn't have an answer for that. I left the room and didn't let it show how much the sentence had landed.
That night I lay awake longer than I care to admit, turning it over like a stone I couldn't put down.
I did not like to admit that a captive's opinion of my own loneliness had cost me an hour of sleep I could not afford to lose. So, like always, I ignored it. I ignored it the same way I ignore everything I wasn't yet ready to look at directly.
I told myself, not entirely convincingly, that I would return to it later, once I'd finished deciding what he actually was to this house.
JACE'S POV
Celeste started pulling me into her study some evenings. Once the rest of the house had gone quiet, she'd set a stack of surveillance stills in front of me, faces from some gala I'd attended and a producer's party I very much had, and I'd gone quiet a beat too long on one of them, not because I recognized the man in it, but because the room behind him, gold light and a particular kind of marble floor, belonged to a house I hadn't let myself think about in nearly a year.
"You know that room," she said. Not the man. The room.
"I did a campaign there once. Watches, I think. Or cologne. They tend to blur together after enough of them."
"You don't sound like someone who enjoyed it."
"I didn't hate it," I said, which was true, and also not the whole truth, which she seemed to understand without my having to say so, because she didn't push further that night. She simply set the photograph aside, made a note in the margin of whatever list she was building, and moved on to the next face.
I did not intend to tell her anything about myself beyond what the work required. I had learnt exactly how much of a person could be extracted through patient, careful proximity, and I recognized the shape of what she was doing almost from the first evening, even as I found myself, against every instinct that had kept me alive this long, doing it anyway.
She asked about the industry the way a person asks about weather in a country they've never visited, genuinely curious, entirely without judgment. I had not expected it, and did not entirely know what to do with it.
I told her, eventually, about the photographers who lingered too long over a setup that didn't need lingering, and she didn't flinch. She didn't offer the practiced sympathy I'd learned to distrust from everyone who'd ever heard a version of that story before. She simply listened, the way she listened to everything, filing it away for later use the way I understood, by then, she filed away everything that crossed her desk.
I told myself that was all it was, for either of us. Information, traded carefully, in a room that locked from the outside