Chapter 9
Gigi materialized from somewhere, setting a plate of pastries on the table between them with the decisive air of a woman who had decided they needed feeding and was not interested in whether they agreed. She looked at Jyn. She looked at the Alps. She looked at Nia.
“This is a very big window,” Gigi said. “I would have put in curtains.”
“I can arrange curtains,” Jyn said.
Gigi pointed at him with one peppermint-scented finger. “You are going to tell me everything about these Chong people. I have been praying against whatever this is since I felt it on the porch and I need specific information for specific prayer.”
“Gigi—” Nia started.
“She is right,” Jyn said. “She should be briefed. She is part of the family.”
Gigi’s expression shifted into something that was not quite approval but was in the general neighborhood. She pulled out the chair next to Jyn, sat down, put the Bible on the table in front of her, and folded her hands.
“I’m listening,” she said.
The Chong family’s heir apparent was a man named Vincent Chong, forty-one years old, who had been running the family’s North American operations for the past six years with the particular combination of ambition and impatience that made him more aggressive than his father had been and less strategic than he thought himself to be. Jyn’s lawyers had been building a case against him for eight months. The evidence was there — the question had always been timing.
A male heir in the Jyn family, they had discovered through their intelligence network, changed the succession calculus in ways that could be leveraged under the old maritime agreements. If Leo was officially recognized as Jyn’s son, certain protections activated that made the Chong family’s position more precarious.
“They want to prevent the recognition,” Nia said.
“Yes.”
“By removing Leo.”
Jyn’s jaw tightened. “They would not have harmed him. They would have used him as leverage.”
“A two-and-a-half-year-old as leverage,” Nia said, and her voice came out very flat and very cold in the way it had come out when she’d told Jeb the dog owner to let go of her arm.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me what you need from me to end this.”
He looked at her. “A DNA test. Filed with our attorneys. Legal recognition of Leo’s paternity.” A pause. “And your agreement to remain here until the case against Vincent Chong is complete.”
“How long?”
“The attorneys believe two months. Possibly three.”
“I have clients,” she said. “I have a business.”
“Your work is digital. You can work from here.”
“Gigi—”
“She will stay here. As will Marcus, if he agrees.”
Nia thought about Marcus, who had already spent the morning having what appeared to be an extremely earnest conversation with two of the security team about protocols and equipment and had been given a tour of the communications center that he had described to Nia in a text as the most impressive thing I have ever seen in my life, Nia, they have nine screens.
“He’ll agree,” she said.
“And Zoe?”
“You’re asking if Zoe can come?”
“I am asking if you need her here. If the answer is yes, it can be arranged.”
Nia thought about Zoe, who was currently at home in the city with the good olive oil and seven thousand unread messages about what was happening and the absolute certainty that she would be furious if she was not included in whatever this was.
“Yes,” she said. “The answer is yes.”
Jyn nodded. Pulled out his phone. Sent a message that presumably initiated the process of bringing Zoe to Switzerland, which was an extraordinary sentence that Nia was filing in the mental category of things I could not have predicted when I was watching a dog steal a stuffed rabbit last week.
“Nia.”
She looked at him.
“The ring,” he said. “I want to be clear about what I was asking.”
“Not tonight,” she said. “You said as long as I needed.”
“I did.” He held her gaze. “I am not retracting that. I am only saying — the ring was not about the Chong family. The ring was not about Leo. It was about you. It is still about you.”
“I know,” she said.
Because she did know. That was the complicated part. She had been angry with him for being exactly what he appeared to be — cold and controlled and enormously private — and had missed, until a dog saved her son on a camera feed, that the controlled exterior was doing the same job she’d always accused it of being: protection. Not of himself. Of the people around him.
Thor stole toys and blankets because he understood, through some instinct that transcended language, that the things that smelled like the small human were worth protecting.
Jyn had offered her five million dollars to leave because he understood, through some calculation that was entirely him, that the people next to him were in danger from the thing that followed him around, and the most expedient way to protect them was to remove them.
And when she had torn up the check, he had not argued.
He had started trying to protect her from where she was instead.
She thought she might be slightly in love with him, which was exactly as terrifying as it sounded.
