His fingers drummed on a BlackBerry that sat next to the clicker. He peeked at the screen, let it darken again. Since BlackBerry was a Canadian company, many believed that it gave better protection from the NSA. Evan guessed that René used a mirror system for his comms, transmitting every text or call through several intermediaries. Only his inner circle would know where he was, keeping him as safe and hidden as a cartel kingpin gone to ground.

René broke in on Evan’s thoughts. “I assumed you would understand,” he said. “After all, we function outside the rules.”

“No.” Evan thumbed another nugget of venison into his mouth. “I’m the sum of my rules.”

“Your rules, perhaps. Not the rules.” René waited for Evan’s counter until it was clear that none was forthcoming. “There aren’t many things I do well. But what I do do well? I do that better than just about anyone. Discerning financial patterns. The ebbs and flows of accounts. Reading the digital droppings people leave behind. It wasn’t the $235,887 you spent on that sword that sank you. It was the forty-one cents.” He leaned forward, searching for a reaction. “That’s my superpower. I see things in numbers others can’t. And I know how to … rearrange matters to get those numbers in my column rather than in someone else’s. My father, he didn’t view that as work. No ‘value add.’ To him it wasn’t a gift. It was just manipulation. He never saw my talent. In another life I could’ve been a director at Goldman Sachs.” His smile was a memory, cold as a ghost. “Imagine that. Imagine if there was one thing, one thing you were meant to do. And it wasn’t acceptable in the eyes of anyone. And yet it was who you are.”

Evan thought of the scattering of freckles across Mia’s nose. The way she swayed when she listened to jazz. The fact that they had decided—for her safety and Peter’s—that he should stay away from her.

René said, “Whether you want to admit it or not, I can see that you understand me. People like us, we exist out of time, really. The day-to-day wear and tear that grinds ordinary folks down. Cubicles and carpool lanes. Earning a penny at a time. Why wade through it all when it’s so easy to … not?”

“I suppose,” Evan said, “that I have an overdeveloped sense of justice.”

“Where do you think it came from?”

“I’ve been on the other side.”

“Isn’t that interesting,” René said. “So have I. That’s what convinced me justice doesn’t exist.”

“What does exist?”

“Luxury.” René sipped his wine. “You could take silk sheets and caviar and inject them directly into my veins.”

“So that’s what you live for?”

“I want to have everything I want for as long as I want it.”

“At any cost?”