A sample from
Answer in Green
Imani Carter had dressed for cross-examination.
She knew the difference between dressing to be wanted and dressing to win, and the black sheath under her coat was the second kind — clean lines, no apology, the heels she wore to verdicts because they made her three inches taller than men who expected to look down. She'd done her face in the rearview mirror the way she did before opening statements: nothing soft, nothing the jury could read as nerves. Then she'd handed her coat to the woman at the door of the Obsidian Club, given her name to a discreet ink ledger, and walked into the room like it was a courtroom that hadn't yet learned to be afraid of her.
The room declined to be afraid.
That was the first thing, and it irritated her immediately. She'd expected — what, exactly? Velvet and red light, men in leather posing at the meaning of themselves. There was velvet, low and oxblood and expensive, and the light was warm rather than lurid, pooling around clusters of furniture that looked less like a dungeon and more like the lobby of a hotel that didn't take walk-ins. A bar ran the length of the far wall in dark wood polished to a depth you could fall into. Somewhere a cello was doing something slow and minor-key under the murmur of voices. Nobody looked up when she came in. Nobody performed for her at all, which she registered the way she registered a witness who wouldn't take the bait — as a problem to be solved, not a slight to be felt.
Fine, she thought. Quieter room. Same work.
Because the work was simple, and she'd rehearsed it on the drive over the way she rehearsed everything. Walk in. Read the floor like a jury pool — who leads with the chin, who needs the audience, who's all front and no spine. Find the one Dominant in the room she could beat. Top him from the bottom, which was the only honest sport in a place like this anyway: let him think he was running the scene while she ran him, take the night she'd come for, and walk out at the end having won. She didn't need a Master. She needed a sparring partner who didn't know that's what he was, and she'd never in her life met the man she couldn't argue onto her own ground.
She took a glass of something from the bar she had no intention of drinking and turned, slow, to case the floor.
The casing came easy. It always did. There was a big one near the fireplace holding court for three people who hung on him, and he was out before he opened his mouth — a man who needed three people to confirm he existed could be unmade by one who refused to. There was a sharp-suited type by the stairs cataloguing the room the same way she was, and she crossed him off too; he'd want the same game she did, and she didn't come here to negotiate a stalemate. There was a younger one, eager, eyes too quick — a child playing dress-up in someone else's certainty. She moved through them the way she moved through a venire, striking for cause, until the floor had thinned to nearly nobody and she felt the first cool finger of something she refused to call disappointment.
And then she found the quiet one.
He was off to the side, not displayed and not hiding, in a chair that he occupied like it had been built to his measurements. Older — early forties, maybe — in a shirt the color of slate with the sleeves turned back over forearms that had done actual work, the kind of hands that didn't come from a gym. He wasn't watching the room. He wasn't watching anything in particular. He had the still, absorbed attention of a man waiting for glue to set, or paint to dry to exactly the right tack — patient in a way that read, to Imani, as nothing happening. No chin. No front. No audience. He hadn't so much as glanced at her, and a man who didn't look was a man who didn't know to brace.
There you are, she thought, and something in her settled into the cold clean focus she lived for. That's the one.
She catalogued him the way she'd catalogue a prosecution witness she meant to dismantle. Stillness: weakness, surely — a man with nothing to push against would have nothing to hold when she pushed. The loose, settled sprawl: complacency, a man who'd gotten comfortable, who'd forgotten the room could bite. He looked, she decided, beatable. Soft in the way that careful things go soft when nobody's tested them in a while. She'd test him. She'd test him until he reached for the control he clearly thought he had and came up with nothing but her, three inches taller in her verdict heels, smiling.
It did not occur to her — she would not let it occur to her — that a man who never reached for control might be a man who'd never once needed to.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.