Page 46 of The Beast
"It won't take long." Still the smile. Still the assessing eyes. "I'm with the federal government. Just a conversation."
I stepped back. He came in.
He looked at the canvases the way a person looked at something they'd been briefed on—not discovery, confirmation. His eyes moved around the studio efficiently, touching the sofa, the hot plate, the window with the city behind it, and I watched him and felt something cold settle into the base of my spine.
"You've had this space for some time," he said.
"Five years."
"And you've kept it—private." He said the word with a quality that made it sound like a vulnerability rather than a choice. "Your family doesn't know about it. Your colleagues at Providence Academy don't know. Your former fiancé—" He paused. Just a breath. "Didn't know either, I imagine."
My stomach had gone hard and cold. "What do you want?"
He turned from the canvases and looked at me directly for the first time, and I understood then that the smile and the suit and the measured knock were a shell. What lived inside the shell was precise and cold and entirely without sentiment.
"I want to be helpful," he said. "That's genuinely all. I'd like to give you some information that I think will be useful to you, given the—" he tilted his head slightly "—changes in your circumstances this weekend."
"I'm listening," I said, because the only thing worse than hearing it was not knowing it.
"You've made an acquaintance," he said. "A man who arrived in this city yesterday under a false name, in a rental car contracted to an alias, whose real name and real history I suspect you don't actually know." He let that land for a moment. "The Dane family, Miss Donovan. The brotherhood based out of this city, the one associated with the pier incident you may recall. They are under active federal investigation. What that means, practically speaking, is that the people around them—" another pause, lighter this time, almost delicate "—become relevant to that investigation."
The room was very quiet.
"The people around them," I said.
"The people around them," he confirmed. "Their associates. Their—" he glanced around the studio "—contacts. The people who might, say, provide a location. A safe house. A place to stay that doesn't appear on any official record."
I felt the blood leave my face.
He watched it happen with the expression of a man who had delivered this particular kind of information before and had learned to give it space.
"I want to be clear," he said, in the tone of a man who was about to be anything but. "I have no interest in you. A development director at a private school, a woman who attended her own wedding yesterday and then apparently went swimming—" the smile again, briefly "—you are not who I'm looking at. I want that understood."
"But," I said.
"But associations have consequences that don't always respect innocence." He put his hands in his pockets, relaxed, a man discussing something neutral. "Your father has a business. A good one, by all accounts—twenty-three years, solid reputation, the kind of thing a family builds over a lifetime. Your mother is active in the parish community. Saint Sebastian's, I believe—she's on the women's guild board, the capital campaign committee." He named the committees with the ease of someone reading from a file, which meant he was. "Your sister—" he stopped. Left it open.
He didn't say Colleen's name. He didn't have to.
The cold in my spine had spread outward through my whole body. I was aware of my hands and how still I was holding them.
"What do you want from me," I said. Not a question this time. A sentence stripped to its bones.
"Information," he said. "If you should happen to be in contact with anyone from the Dane organization—or anyone associated with their operations—I would find it valuable to know the content of those conversations. The location of meetings. Anything operationally relevant." He paused. "You would be protected, of course. Formally, if necessary. Your family's circumstances would remain—" he looked around the studio one more time "—private."
The word again. Private. He'd weaponized it twice now in the space of five minutes, and I understood exactly what he was pointing at with it. The studio. Colleen. The things that belonged to the Donovan women that no one had been supposed to know.
"And if I say no?” I asked.
He looked at me with an expression of such practiced reasonableness that I felt something in me go very, very cold.
"I'd be disappointed," he said simply. "I'd encourage you to think it over. I'd give you some time." He reached into his breast pocket and produced a card—plain, just a number, no name—and set it on the edge of the nearest canvas stack. "These decisions are better made without pressure. I understand that. Take the time you need." He straightened. "But I'd encourage you to make it soon. The investigation is moving quickly, and the window for—cooperation—has a natural close."
He picked up his hat from where he'd rested it against the wall—he'd brought a hat, which struck me as the most deliberate thing about him, the most calculated, a man who understood the value of old-fashioned gestures—and moved toward the door.
At the threshold, he paused and looked back. I saw it then, very briefly, the thing the suit and the smile were covering. Something that was not reasonable at all.
"Lovely work," he said, and nodded at the canvases. "You have real talent, Miss Donovan. It would be a shame to have any of this disrupted."
