Chapter 3

The footsteps came to a stop beside Cora, and a voice said, very quietly, "Ma'am, is everything okay?"

Cora turned. A young man in a gray suit stood there, a lanyard around his neck with a badge that said MERCER on it. He was maybe twenty-six, with a worried crease between his eyebrows and a stack of folders in his arms. He was looking at Cora with the particular attention of someone who had been told to deal with a problem and was not entirely sure how.

"I'm fine," Cora said.

The young man, whose name tag read *J. Mercer*, glanced at the coins on the floor. Then he looked at Derek, who was now sitting in the driver's seat of the black hypercar with Priya leaning over the door, laughing at something he had said. Then he looked back at Cora. He was obviously trying to piece together what had happened here, and he was not arriving at a comfortable answer.

"Did someone — " he started, and stopped. He looked at the coins again. "Do you need me to call security?"

Cora considered this. She could feel the fob in her hand, heavy and solid, a fact that no one in this room knew. She could tell J. Mercer everything. She could show him the fob, and he would recognize it, because the fob was part of the company's security protocol and any employee worth his badge would have seen the training slides about what it was and who held it. Or she could stay silent, and watch.

"Not yet," Cora said.

J. Mercer's expression flickered, but he did not push. He had been trained, Cora guessed, to de-escalate, and he seemed to recognize that pushing this particular woman would not de-escalate anything. He straightened, tucked his folders under one arm, and said, "I'll be at the desk if you need anything."

He walked away, and Cora watched him go. She made a mental note of his name, because she had seen something in his face that she liked: a discomfort that had not hardened into denial. He had seen the coins. He had not stepped over them.