Ryan's POV
Ryan Bennett did not sleep past six.
It wasn't discipline exactly — or rather it had started as discipline, at seventeen when he had decided with the particular cold clarity of a teenager who has looked at his circumstances and found them unacceptable that he would simply outwork every single person who had been given what he hadn't. He had set his alarm for six every morning for six years until the alarm became unnecessary, until his body simply woke itself at the appointed hour with the reliability of something mechanical, indifferent to how late the night before had run or what it had contained.
This morning it was five fifty eight.
He lay in the dark of his apartment for the two minutes he always allowed himself — not sleeping, not quite thinking, existing in that narrow corridor between the two — and looked at the ceiling and listened to London assembling itself outside the floor to ceiling windows. The city had its own morning sounds, distinct from its daytime sounds, quieter and more honest. Delivery vehicles. A distant siren. Rain still tapping against the glass with the patience of something that had all the time in the world.
At six exactly he got up.
The apartment was on the fourteenth floor of a building in Marylebone that he had moved into eight months ago when his first significant deal had closed and he had allowed himself, for the first and only time, to spend money on something purely because he wanted to rather than because it was strategically sound. It was not a penthouse — that would come later, in the version of his life he was still building — but it was large and clean and high enough above the street that the city became a view rather than a fact.
He made coffee in the kitchen with the same efficiency he brought to everything — precise, unhurried, no wasted movements. Black, no sugar, the way he had drunk it since university when he had decided that preferences were a form of inefficiency and had systematically reduced his to the minimum required for function.
He stood at the window with the coffee and looked at London in the rain.
He was thinking about Anna Sterling.
He had been thinking about Anna Sterling since approximately eleven forty five the previous evening when she had said goodnight Ryan and walked away through the crowd and he had stood at that window feeling, inexplicably and irritatingly, like a man who had just missed something important without being able to identify what it was.
He had driven home thinking about her. Had showered thinking about her. Had lain in the dark of his bedroom for forty minutes — forty minutes, which was thirty eight more than he typically required — thinking about her before sleep had finally arrived and taken the question temporarily out of his hands.
And now here he was. Six in the morning. Coffee in hand. Still thinking about her.
He was not a man who thought about people he couldn't explain. He was not, generally, a man who thought about people at all beyond what was professionally necessary. He understood people — their motivations, their pressures, their particular varieties of ambition and fear — with a clinical efficiency that had served him extraordinarily well in every boardroom and negotiation he had ever entered. But understanding people was different from thinking about them. Understanding was a tool. Thinking about them was something else entirely and he didn't have a comfortable category for it.
Anna at that window. White knuckles. Cathedral eyes. Goodnight Ryan said like a door being carefully, deliberately closed.
He turned away from the window.
By eight o'clock he had read the morning's financial news, responded to eleven emails, reviewed the preliminary figures for a acquisition he was considering in the north and found them wanting in two specific areas he had already identified before opening the document, and eaten breakfast standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down for breakfast alone in a large apartment felt like an admission of something he wasn't prepared to admit.
By eight thirty he was in the car being driven to the office.
By nine he was in the first of three meetings that would occupy his morning — a discussion with his small and carefully chosen team about a commercial property deal in Canary Wharf that was progressing with satisfying momentum. He sat at the head of the table and listened and asked three questions that visibly reorganised the thinking in the room and watched his team adjust their positions accordingly and felt the familiar clean satisfaction of a mind operating at the level it was built for.
He was completely present.
He was almost completely present.
There was a small persistent corner of his attention that kept drifting, the way attention does when something unresolved is sitting just outside the frame of consciousness, quietly insisting on itself. He reeled it back each time with the practiced efficiency of a man who had spent years training his focus into something close to absolute.
It kept drifting back.
White knuckles.
He called a short break at ten thirty.
Stepped out onto the small terrace off the meeting room — four floors up, the rain having stopped, London spread out in the clean washed light of a morning after weather — and took out his phone.
He stood there for a moment.
He was looking for her number in his contacts and then he was calling a university friend who owed him several favours — Marcus, who had known everyone at Imperial and had maintained an almost aggressive enthusiasm for staying in touch with all of them — and having a brief, casual, entirely unremarkable conversation that ended with Anna Calloway's number sitting in his phone.
He looked at it.
Put the phone in his pocket.
Went back into the meeting.
He sent the text at twelve forty seven, between the second and third meetings, standing in the corridor outside the boardroom with a bottle of water in one hand and his phone in the other.
It was good to see you last night. — Ryan
He read it back once.
It was perfectly ordinary. Polite. The kind of message that carried no weight and required no particular response and communicated nothing beyond the surface meaning of its eleven words.
He sent it.
Put his phone face down on the table when he went back into the meeting and did not look at it for the duration, which lasted one hour and twenty minutes.
When the meeting ended and the room emptied he turned the phone over.
Nothing.
He went to his office. Worked. The Canary Wharf figures needed restructuring in the two areas he had identified that morning and he gave them his complete attention for the better part of an hour, drafting notes in the precise shorthand he had developed over years that nobody else could read, which he considered a feature rather than a problem.
His phone sat on the desk.
He didn't look at it.
He looked at it twice.
At two fifteen it buzzed.
He reached for it with a casualness that he was aware, on some level, was entirely performed for an audience of nobody.
It was a surprise. London has a way of doing that.
— Anna
He read it.
Read it again.
Set the phone down and looked at it as though it had said something he needed to think about, which it had.
Eleven words back for eleven words sent. Perfectly balanced. Warm enough to be polite, measured enough to be meaningless, and underneath both of those things — underneath the surface courtesy of it — something that resisted his usual instinct for reading people with a smoothness that was either entirely natural or entirely deliberate.
He couldn't tell which.
That was the thing. That was the specific thing that had been itching at him since last night at that window. With most people — with virtually every person he had ever met — he could tell. Within minutes, sometimes within seconds, he had the essential shape of a person. Their tells. Their gaps. The specific texture of what they were hiding and how hard they were working to hide it.
Anna gave him nothing.
Not in the hostile way of someone who was deliberately guarding themselves. Not in the empty way of someone who simply had nothing interesting beneath the surface. In a stranger way than either of those. Like looking at a window and finding that instead of reflecting the room back at you it was showing you something else entirely — another room, another light, another version of the view that you couldn't quite make out from where you were standing.
It bothered him.
He didn't like things he couldn't make out.
He picked up the phone again.
Put it down.
Picked it up.
He was a man who made decisions quickly and without the tedious self-negotiation that seemed to consume most people's interior lives. He identified what he wanted, assessed the most direct route to it, and moved. It was that simple. It had always been that simple.
He wanted to understand Anna Sterling.
That was all this was. Simple intellectual curiosity about an unsolved thing. He was constitutionally incapable of leaving unsolved things alone and Anna was an unsolved thing and the solution was straightforward — more information, more data, more access.
Simple.
He opened the message thread.
Typed.
Read it back once.
His thumb hovered over send for exactly three seconds — which was three seconds longer than he typically hovered over anything — and then he pressed it and set the phone down and swivelled his chair back toward the Canary Wharf figures because there was work to be done and he had already given this more than enough of his morning.
The figures blurred slightly.
He blinked.
Refocused.
Outside his office window London moved through its afternoon with its usual magnificent indifference and Ryan Bennett sat at his desk and waited, in the particular way of a man who would never admit he was waiting, for his phone to buzz.
— End of Chapter 6 —