Page 40 of Tell Me Why
“There is time,” he said. “Not much, I suspect, but there is time. I came without Keon being able to track us, I have… professional confidence. But if I fail for too long and am unfindable in the meantime, he is going to suspect that I have abandoned his side of the job, and I still… I must be free of him, Crissy. He has held me for too long.”
“Is that why you ran away?” Isabella asked. “Camehere?”
“No,” he said. “But I couldn’t stay there because of it. It was too easy for him to ask me for minor favors that meant nothing, but that kept me in orbit. You matter to him that much.”
“Keeping you close, keeping you in orbit, an endless stream of miniature requests and demands, ongoing compliance and obedience,” Isabella said. “Yes, I can see how that would be… constraining.”
“Your freedom is your own,” Tell said. “I won’t take it away from you.”
“You are here to do just that,” Isabella said. “Whether you know it or not.”
“Isabella,” Tell said. “Look at her.”
The stunning woman turned her eyes to Tina again.
“You brought your own leverage,” she murmured. “And if I have become the monster you fear?”
“Then I will fight you,” Tell said. “But I would rather that we be in league, as we once were, angling for the best outcome that was available, rather than just the best one that was offered.”
“You shouldn’t have brought her,” Isabella said. “It gets much worse from here than it would have.”
“I would play at being dashing and confident, but it was part of the terms,” he said. “I don’t know precisely what Keon’s endgame is, in that. Perhaps he hoped that you would rise to the bait and turn me against you. Perhaps he wanted to remind you of something very old and perhaps well-remembered. Perhaps he wanted to limit my options in what happens next. There are a dozen other possibilities I’ve considered, and I’m certain others that Keon thought of before me. I brought her for my own reasons, and some of them have nothing to do with you.”
“I will speak to Daryll,” she said. “I will have fountains sent down, and food. Is there anything you favor?”
“Yogurt,” Tell said easily, giving her his brand and flavors.
“Refrigeration will be… a negotiation,” she said.
“Just an icebox,” Tell said without concern. “The room has no power, outside of the lights, or I would ask for a television and a selection of movies, but we will make do for entertainment.”
“The systems will turn back on after I leave,” she said, and he nodded.
“I understand.”
Tina didn’t.
But that was okay.
She was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to. There was a lot going on in this conversation that Tina wasn’t able to grab on the way by, from the tone and the pacing of it, but even what she could get… she didn’t know what to think of it.
Were they friends or not? She understood it was more complicated than that, but Tell and Isabella appeared to have come to their conclusions, and Tina wasn’t sure at all what they were.
Isabella stood, straightening out her shorts and adjusting her shirt, then fluffing her hair back.
“You’re going to be trouble,” she said to Tina.
“Probably,” Tina agreed. Tell laughed.
“You have no idea,” he said.
A pairof fountains came in late in the evening, by Tina’s count, and they fed.
It was transactional and disconnected, and somehow jarring in a new way. Tell had been financing Tina’s fountains since the beginning, and while she did have her own wealth to draw on from Anton’s sales of her cure doses, it was just easier to let that money go through him to Kirsten or the fountains directly, so that Tina didn’t have to learn how to get the financial system to work for her.
But even with Tell paying the fountains, and even with unnamed men and women showing up for Tina to feed off of, it hadn’t ever been cold and mechanical like this was. The fountains were generally happy and some combination of curious or confident or simply at home. These, Tina couldhearthem react to her, but they had the discipline and withdrawal to fail to even take in a breath when she bit them.
She wouldn’t do it again.
