“Yes.” Odette drew her hand back from his arm.

There is a particular silence that falls when a room revises its understanding of someone all at once, and Crispin sat in the exact center of it.

He could feel the recalculation happening around the table — every person quietly running back through the evening, through the story about the secondhand computer and the empire built alone, through his little joke that the reclusive president would come straight to him because Stroud was one of her best investments.

All of it was being re-read now in a new light, and the light was not flattering.

He had spent the whole night performing a version of himself for these people, and the woman he’d hidden in a kitchen had just walked onto a stage and, without raising her voice, without so much as glancing in his direction, revised every word of it.

What undid him was not that she was powerful.