Owen was all out of chitchat, and he was also all out of pretending as if there was any more stored away somewhere behind his eyes. So he just let her look at his blank expression and take inventory of the rest of his patience.

She was undeterred. “You’ve got to see this. Or have you already? It’s everywhere. So cool. I love it. It’ll make your day if you haven’t.”

Unbelievable.

And because he literally couldn’t think past the oblivious patter from this woman, this airy, happy, impossibly annoying creature, he let her direct his gaze to her iPad.

“Look at this kid. Watch what she does.”

Charlie was carbonated with excitement—about this video playing on the screen, about the utterly mundane adventure she was on, about life in general when she got two steps out of her routine. It occurred to him that some people would find Charlie irrepressible. It badly made him want to press her until she cried.

Owen had a blister of fury rising in him at all times, chafed raw by each dull stupidity and sparkling inanity in the world that he couldn’t avoid. He didn’t hurt people when he couldn’t get away with it, but he did catalog how it felt in these moments that he really wanted to. He used it for fuel in the times that he could. A few people paid for all the rest of them.

The girl in the video was being dragged by her ankle. In the mood he was in, Owen vaguely approved.

Then the tug on his attention from the edge of the screen.

Oh, you bitch.

Not Ann. No. She’d gone from useless to his new favorite person in two crashing heartbeats.

The painting. Marcelline. You fucking bitch.

“Do you want me to play it again?”

Owen smiled and nodded at—Oh, what the hell—at Charlie. She blushed and reloaded the video.

People rarely tried to get one over on Owen. He knew the recipe for the cooperation he collected. It didn’t take anything away from his success for him to know what it was made of. And it was made largely of money and intimidation. Only the really clever ones realized they probably had nothing to fear from him. Probably.

Marcelline Gossard had been one of the clever ones. From the very first time he’d walked into the art gallery, she always looked him in the face and never once did that measuring-tape thing with her eyes or flinch when he stepped into her sight line. Owen had made a career out of being a walking omen, eclipsing too much light out of everyone’s peripheral vision wherever he went. He enjoyed watching people do the math of what it might mean to find him suddenly there.