He was already there.
She hadn't expected that exactly, though she probably should have. It was seven in the morning and Aiden Vale was in office one with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up and three separate stacks of papers on the desk that looked like they'd been there since the night before.
He looked up when she knocked and opened the door without waiting for an answer, because she'd decided on the walk over that she was done waiting for things she could just do.
"You're early," he said.
"You said come when I had questions."
"I said come early before your shift."
"It's early." She sat down. Same chair. "I have questions."
He looked at her for a second. Then he put down whatever he was holding and leaned back. "Alright."
She'd written them in order of importance on the bus. She looked at the notebook in her lap and then closed it because she didn't actually need the list. She'd been awake most of the night with these questions. She knew them.
"Are you protecting me or preparing me," she said.
He didn't answer immediately. She'd expected that. What she hadn't expected was the way something moved across his face, subtle and quick, like the question had landed somewhere specific.
"Both," he said.
"For what."
"The possibility that V finds you before we understand why your mother was targeted."
"And what happens if he does."
"Nothing good." He said it plainly, without drama. "Which is why we're trying to move faster than that."
She noted the we again. Third time now. "Who is we. Specifically?"
He was quiet for a moment. He picked up his coffee, realized it was probably cold, set it back down. "There are four people who have been working on this. Myself. Mira. Lena." A pause. "And someone you haven't met yet."
"Why haven't I met them?"
"Because we needed to be sure about you first."
"Sure of what."
"That you were ready for it. That you could handle the information without..." he stopped. Chose a different word. "Without doing something that would alert the wrong people."
Ivy looked at him. "You thought I might go looking for V myself..."
"It occurred to us as a possibility."
"And now."
"Now I think you're smart enough not to." He met her eyes. "Am I right ?"
"Ask me again after you've told me everything."
He almost smiled. Almost , almost . "Fair."
She looked down at her hands for a second. Outside the office she could hear the building starting its morning, someone moving through the corridor, the distant sound of a delivery at the back entrance.
"The thing they think I inherited," she said. "My mother didn't know what it was. Do you? "
This pause was longer than the others.
"There's a belief," he said carefully, "in certain circles, that some bloodlines carry a specific kind of perception. The ability to read situations, people, patterns, in ways that aren't entirely explained by intelligence or experience. " It's more than intuition. He looked at her steadily. "Your mother had it. It's part of why V wanted her to stay. Part of why she was valuable to the family."
Ivy sat with that.
"That's not a thing," she said.
"I know how it sounds."
"It sounds insane."
"Yes."
"You're telling me a powerful family has been hunting my mother and potentially me because they believe we have some kind of..." she gestured vaguely "... what. Ability?"
"I'm telling you what they believe." He leaned forward slightly. "What V believes. Whether it's real or not doesn't change the fact that he acted on it. It doesn't change what happened to your mother."
She was quiet. All of this was insane.
But then she thought about a lifetime of walking into rooms and knowing things before she could explain how. Reading people three seconds before their body language caught up. The way she'd cracked the bar staff's signal system in two days when Mira said it had taken her three weeks.
She thought about her mother writing
"I don't know what they think it is exactly " like she genuinely didn't understand it in herself either.
She didn't say any of that out loud.
"What happened to her," Ivy said. "You told me she disappeared. But you know more than that."
He looked at her for a long moment.
"We think she ran," he said. "Successfully, at first. She got out of the city, changed her name, stayed hidden for a while." He paused.
"But three years ago we found evidence that V located her. We don't know what happened after that."
Three years ago Ivy had been seventeen. Living with a rotating series of arrangements that were technically housing and practically not much else, working part time at a grocery store, saving money in a jar under her bed because banks felt like something that could be taken away.
Her mother had potentially been found three years ago!!
She hadn't known. She'd been seventeen and worried about rent and her mother had been...
She stopped that thought.
"You don't know if she's alive," she said.
"No." His voice was quiet. Careful. "We don't know."
The room held that for a moment.
Ivy breathed in slowly through her nose. Out again. She wasn't going to fall apart in this office. She wasn't going to fall apart anywhere she couldn't control, and especially not here, not in front of him, not when she needed to keep thinking clearly.
"Okay," she said.
"Ivy..."
"I said okay." She looked up at him. "I'm fine. Keep going."
He looked at her with that expression she'd decoded somewhere around Chapter eleven of knowing him. The one that wasn't distance. The one that was something much more careful than distance.
He kept going.
"The fourth person," he said. "The one you haven't met. Her name is Sera. She's been tracking V's movements for two years. She has information we don't have access to otherwise." He paused.
"She wants to meet you."
"When."
"That's up to you."
Ivy almost laughed at that. After weeks of things being on his timeline, on the building's timeline, on the careful ordered schedule of information being released when he decided she was ready.
"Now it's up to me?," she said.
"This part always was."
She looked at him. He looked back.
Outside the building was waking up around them and in an hour the floor would open and guests would arrive and Velvet House would become what it showed the world instead of what it actually was.
But right now it was seven-fifteen in the morning and Ivy was sitting in a chair across from a man who had kept a promise for sixteen years and had just told her that her mother might be alive somewhere and that a family she'd never heard of believed she'd inherited something she didn't have a name for yet.
She thought about Luna's question from last night.
Protecting or preparing.
Both, he'd said.
She was starting to understand that in this particular situation those two things were the same.
"Tell Sera," she said, "that I'll meet her."
"When?"
Ivy stood up. Straightened her jacket. Picked up her notebook.
"Soon," she said, and left the office.