by Faye, Amy
"I would," David replied, ignoring her when she started to screw up her face in confusion and opened her mouth to speak. "But I can't. Okay? Are you listening now, or should I just ignore your protests until you've let me finish?"
Diana shut her mouth and looked at him, wide eyed and expectant and ready to throw a god damned hissy fit if he didn't figure out some way to stop being such a little bitch about the whole thing. "Fine, go on."
"Thank you for your permission," he said, his tone passive-aggressively friendly. "Now, the problem is, I was asked for you by name. He says he knows you, and this isn't exactly a client I'm ready to walk away from. So if he wants to see his old friend Diana, I'm not going to send in Scott or Jennifer, am I?"
Diana raised an eyebrow. "No, I guess you wouldn't."
"I'm glad we could see eye to eye on this. He's in conference 2."
"Who is this, precisely, anyways?"
David's face split into a grin. "I would hate to spoil the surprise for you. Trust me, you won't guess."
"Okay, give me a minute." She set an envelope in between the pages where she'd been scanning through, flipped the book closed and set it atop the 'unread' stack on her right. Hopefully, that would be clear enough when she came back. Whoever it was that had decided to distract her from the work, well, they would have to figure out a damned good reason that they'd needed to do it because otherwise they were going to be in a whole world of unpleasantness. The exact same world of unpleasantness, she added silently, that they'd just decided to put her through, in spite of the fact that taking statements was not part of her job description.
She rubbed at her eyes as she walked, the yellow pad of paper under one arm, a pen stuffed hastily into her pocket. She folded the pages she'd been writing around to the back, careful not to tear them off because once she was done with this little diversion she was going to have to go back to them.
The door to conference room 2 was closed, and the windows were frosted, so all that Diana could see for a certainty was that there was one man inside, tallish, wearing dark clothing and looking out the window. It wasn't a view that Diana enjoyed. Twenty floors up was high, and she could manage to ignore it when there weren't any windows in the room, or when she was sufficiently far away from those windows that all she could see was sky.
In Conference 2, though, the windows took up most of the wall, and there was no avoiding the feeling that you were looking down on a tiny city below. A tiny city that she had no problem with when she was down on the ground, and all the buildings around her were impossibly tall. When she was in one of those impossibly tall buildings and looking out at all the other ones, slightly less tall, it was a horse of a different color.
"Hello, can I help you?"
The man turned with an easy grace, the way that a big jungle cat would, or a mountain lion. Graceful, powerful, and vaguely threatening.
"Diana. I thought that sounded like your name."
She stopped and looked at him again, for the second time in two days. Alex Blume was a big name. She suddenly realized with a sick feeling in her gut exactly why David had been so insistent on getting him whatever it was that he asked for, and she suddenly realized that it made no sense at all for him to be here.
"Mr. Blume," she stammered, and got no further before the words ran out altogether.
He had his own lawyers, she knew. He had the money to buy up the entire firm that she stood in, as well as the accountant's office the next suite over, and the medical suite beside it. Famously litigious, Blume was assumed to have hundreds of lawyers on call at any given moment. And for some reason, he'd walked into Black & Rosen, a small firm on the backside of nowhere, and asked for a paralegal temp by name.
"How are you feeling? I know it's a bit soon to be back at work after your father's funeral, I can't imagine how you must be feeling right now."
Numb, Diana thought. I'm feeling numb. "The work helps me keep my mind off things," she lied. It didn't help. It didn't hurt. She was still trying to decide exactly what her feelings about her father were, and the job was just something that she had to do in the meantime. Unlike Dad, she didn't have a 'practical skill' that people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for.
"I bet it does," Blume agreed.
"How can we help you today, Mr. Blume?"
"Please, call me Alex," he answered easily, but if he heard the question, then he certainly didn't make any effort to give it a response.
"Well, then... 'Alex,' what brings you in here? I don't suppose it could be something legal-related. After all, I suppose you've got plenty of lawyers on staff at Blume Industrial, I don't imagine..."
"Here's a piece of advice for you," he said, cutting her off and stepping up to her in long steps that put him standing right inside her space before she even knew what was happening. "Don't try to talk your customers out of engaging with your product. Heaven knows where I'd be if I did that myself. No, it doesn't matter whether or not I've got men on staff. I came here, so you ought to assume I'm looking for something here. Isn't that right?"
"You're right, Mr., uh... Alex. I don't know what I was thinking. How can I help you?"
"First, I'd like you to set up a trust, in my name. Second, afterwards, I'd like you to come with me to dinner." He smiled, and the smile had an animal quality that set her skin itching. "Is that going to be a problem?"
"No," she said, and tried to ignore the feeling in her gut that she was in over her head. If it was with Alex Blume, looking at her like that, she would go in so far over her head that she couldn't see the surface, as long as he asked her to.
3
Diana's eyes couldn't stay on the paper and it was about twenty minutes past distracting. The fact that there was more to this than met the eye was obvious. She wasn't a lawyer, nor training to be one, aside from the fact that she had read as many case briefs as some law students.
But even Diana was able to see that there was something strange about what he wanted. Even if he were only giving her the information to hand off to a partner, it was strange. Why would he come here to do it? Why not just go to his own lawyers? Surely there was a law firm in Seattle that he could find, instead of staying out here for another week or more so that he could get this all set up.
But here he was, regardless, and here he was apparently planning to stay until the trust was finally set up in its entirety. Something about the whole thing felt off, but Diana wasn't in a position to ask and she certainly wasn't in a position to know what it was. She'd already been lectured once for trying to talk him out of the decisions he was making and she wasn't about to open herself up to that kind of criticism a second time, not when it was Alex freaking Blume.
She looked down at the written notes, looked over at the laptop screen that made a checklist so simple that a monkey could follow it, and ensured for the third time that things were all in order.
"Uh, I think this is everything. So if you just give me a minute," she said, packing everything up, stuffing her pen back into her breast shirt pocket and bundling the pad and the notebook computer together. "I'll come back with one of the partners to talk to you about the details and draw up the contract."
"You're not going to be the one drawing me up?"
"I, uh, don't do that. I'm not even really a law student, I just applied for the job and they gave me a chance." The smile on her face was honestly bashful and Diana wasn't sure whether she should be embarrassed or not, but she felt it either way. "Someone will be with you in a minute, Mr. Blume."
"I told you to call me Alex, didn't I?" He had a faint smile that she hoped was supposed to tell her that it was all fine, really, and he was only teasing her. If he was, then it was working, because she was as nervous as could be.
"Sorry, Mr. Alex. I'm just... don't, uh. I'll have someone in here in five minutes, so don't worry for a second."
"No, I won't worry in the least bit. I know you can do it."
"Well, if you'll excuse me," she said, and started to open the door.<
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"How's six o'clock?"
"I'm sorry?"
Diana realized what he meant an instant before he spoke his answer. "I asked you to dinner, didn't I?"
She laughed, sounding nervous even to her own ears. "I'm flattered, but I'm sure you've got more important things to do."
The gaze he fixed on her wasn't nearly as playful as the ones that he'd given her up to that point. If anything, he looked a little bit irritated, as if he were tired and frustrated by her efforts to play hard to get.
"If I had something more important to do, I wouldn't ask. Trust me, Diana, when I say that this is important."
She let out a long breath and tried to hold her own focus for a moment, distracting as his face was. As every part of him was, really, from his star power down to his suit that cost more than her beat-up jalopy. "Uh. Yeah. Six is fine. I might be, just a few minutes, late coming down, if that's not a problem."
"Great. I'll see you then. Six sharp. I'll be waiting in the car outside. You won't be able to miss it."
She gave him a nervous smile, unsure how she was supposed to take his interest in her, except that she knew that she was taking it somehow. She might not have been sure how to deal with it, but she knew one thing to a certainty, and that was that she appreciated it more than she probably should have. She shivered as she left the room and that gaze, hot and heavy, fell off of her shoulders.
She pulled the paper from the pad that she'd been writing on and dropped it onto the copy machine, punched the buttons to start it copying in triplicate, and went off to find Mr. Rosen. He was in his office, same as always, staring at his computer screen. Diana did her best impression of not thinking for a moment that he probably wasn't working much at all.
If she were honest, there was a big part of her that suspected he spent the majority of the day on Twitter. But she wasn't in a position to question her boss's day-to-day habits, and it wasn't exactly a position she wanted to try on for size, either.
So instead she just ignored it, like she ignored most things.
"Mr. Rosen, sir? Mr. Blume is ready for you in Conference 2."
The lawyer looked up at her with his lined, grandfatherly manner. She couldn't help thinking that his expression was anything but grandfatherly, but he hadn't made any inappropriate comments, hadn't laid a single finger on any part of her, properly or improperly, so if he was going to notice that her shirt was a little bit low cut today and say nothing about it, then that was his right. After all, the shirt was a little bit low-cut. Besides, she told herself, she was probably just imagining it in either case.
"Thank you," he told her, smiling and standing up from his desk, slapping a few keys on the keyboard and walking along with her. "I'll be right in."
"Here's my notes from the preliminary. He wants to open a trust, value of two hundred million dollars, with a trustee to be named by him at a later date. He says it's towards a specific purpose, but when I asked him what it was, he said, I'm quoting here, 'it's a surprise,' and wouldn't be pressed any further."
Rosen rubbed at his eyes. "Okay, none of that should be a problem."
"Anything else, sir?"
"No," he answered. "Nothing else. Thank you, Diana. You can go back to what you were doing."
There was a little voice in the back of her mind that wondered if there was some kind of bonus for appeasing a big name client like Alex Blume. She didn't bother to ask, though. If there was then Diana trusted Mr. Black and Mr. Rosen to tell her about it, and if there wasn't, she didn't want to risk sounding naive. So she watched him go into Conference 2, a room suited for ten or twenty people all sitting around a desk for negotiations and the like, and would now hold exactly two.
She turned back to the room where she'd been working. The door was left unlocked, but someone must have closed it in the time she'd been gone. To be fair, having the door standing open for half an hour wasn't exactly reasonable, so it didn't strike her as remotely odd.
The lights being out didn't surprise her, either; she'd turned them out herself. The library at Black and Rosen wasn't a large one, by any stretch, but it had a dozen or more overhead lights, and Diana wasn't about to be the one yelled at about the unnecessary power expenditure.
What did surprise her was what she saw when she stepped inside. Someone was standing there, the book flipped open to where she'd marked the pages, his finger pressed into the text and scanning left to right.
"Mr. Blume!" He looked up, seeming to be almost as startled as she was.
"Miss Kramer! Lord, you gave me a start. I'm sorry, I got a little bit bored, and I just thought..."
The explanation sounded hollow, and an instant later Mr. Rosen's head appeared in the doorway. "Diana, do you know..."
He was looking where he'd expected to find her, Diana knew, but he wasn't going to find her there. She had just stepped in a little way. Instead, he saw exactly what she saw. The man who had come in for a mystery trust, the man wearing his ten thousand dollar suit, the man who could have bought every one of them and the rights to their children if he wanted to name a number high enough.
"Mr. Blume," he said, at a loss. For a moment the whole conversation seemed as if it were going to play out the exact same way that it had with Diana. Then Alex looked over at her, his eyes twinkling with amusement that she couldn't understand and didn't care to try.
"Sorry, I was just looking around. Which way was the bathroom again?"
He turned as he started to follow Mr. Rosen out the door and mouthed the words at Diana, words she wouldn't have understood if she hadn't just heard them two minutes beforehand. 'Six o'clock.'
4
Alex Blume frowned and looked over at the clock on the dashboard of the car, wondering if he had the time before six rolled around to take care of some other business. There was a long distance to travel if he decided he did, but a few miles would barely be a blip on his radar. He would just be getting warm by the time he finally settled back into the car.
Twenty minutes to cover ten miles out and ten miles back? He mulled the timing over and nodded to himself. There was time, though he'd have to rush when he got there. No time for dawdling. He stepped out of the car and looked around. The highway was right by him, but there would be too many people focused on the road ahead of them. The bigger concern was the building beside him, but...
Well, there was plenty to worry about, he knew. But there wasn't much time to worry about it, and everything was fine most of the time. If it wasn't, well, he could buy the silence of everyone in the building for less than he hoped to gain.
He stretched out and let the glamour fade, let himself stretch out the wings that he'd been holding back and leaped into the air. His wings unfurled, a dozen or so feet into the sky and caught the wind under them, and he pulled himself up into the air by them, the wings moving too hard and too fast for the wind to move out of the way, pulling him up. Up, up, up, until the buildings around him looked like toys.
Then, he dove hard towards the ground, picking up speed, faster and faster, until he pulled his wings back wide again and flattened out, a scant thousand feet off the ground. The air whipped against his face, but he pulled himself faster, faster, faster. He had places to be, and barely any time to waste moving from point A to point B.
There were few dragons who preferred to keep up their glamour when there were no humans around. It was uncomfortable, sucked at the back of your mind, like the feeling of having maybe left the oven on when you left the house, multiplied by ten.
Alex wasn't one of them, but it was hard to do any serious flying when you had to hide yourself. Hard as hell. He smiled to himself at the thought of what he'd been able to get done that day. There was a lot more to be done. A hell of a lot more, if he were going to get his revenge. That would come later. For now, he had to hurry, and had to make sure that he didn't let his concentration slip for even a moment as he flew, darting between the tallest of the tall buildings until he hit the edge of town.
There was a tri
o of dragons outside, wearing their human appearance well. Each of them were attractive, thoroughly muscled like athletes. Each of them wore clothes as expensive as any he'd worn.
It was easy, when you hid yourself with magic, to pretend that you could afford anything you wanted to be able to afford. To have seen a piece of clothing was to be able to show it off to the rest of the world as if it was your own.
Alex preferred to wear honest clothes, like a human. Like the man that he delighted in pretending to be. He swooped down hard, pulled himself up only a few feet from the ground and then dropped down when his momentum had stopped itself. The landing would have hurt his knees, if he were the man he pretended to be, but for a dragon, it was a little thing.
"How's it going?" he asked, shifting only momentarily into a human appearance.
"You know you're not supposed to be going around like that," said one. "You'll be seen."
"Hardly, and if I were, then so what? It's not a big deal, either way."
The female scowled at him, her features darkening until she looked like she might lose more than just her composure. "You know better, 'Alex Blume.'"
"I know I do, Cyanora. And you know full well that I don't much care, regardless of what the rules say."
She sneered at him and hissed out a warning that carried with it a subtle charge of electricity that tugged at the hairs on his arm. Then he stepped towards the hill and through the illusion of ground and into the lair. It had been a long way. Exceedingly long, even for a Dragon. To have two homes, two proper homes, was odd. To live in his human form, Alex thought... that was even odder.
Then again, he knew a certain amount about that life. He knew what it was like to be strange, to do things his own way. To do things the wrong way, if the three outside were to be believed. They were not unique in their estimation of things, but when one of their kind died, it wasn't something that they took lightly.
The fact that he'd let it happen to himself, that was another story altogether.
