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She was not applying it professionally. She was aware of this.

“Awakened magic responds to who’s nearby.” He kept his forearms on the table. “The right person calms it. The wrong one makes it worse.”

She waited. She’d been in enough meetings to know when someone was building toward a thing.

There it was. She looked at him.

He was choosing his words. She could see it — not in any obvious way, not in a pause or hesitation, but in how deliberately precise he was. She’d worked with lawyers, brand strategists, and three different C-suite executives who were allergic to direct statements, and she recognized this move: someone telling a true thing while carefully choosing which true thing to tell.

“You’re describing a mechanism.”

“Yes.”

“A general mechanism.”

He let the silence sit for a second before he answered. “How it works in general is what matters right now.”

She studied him. He looked back with the same expression she’d noticed at the boardwalk and still hadn’t successfully categorized — completely direct, giving absolutely nothing away, yet somehow not impersonal. It wasn’t a blank look. It was full. It was complete attention, full stop, which was its own category of disconcerting.

She could push it. She was excellent at pushing— twenty years of asking questions for a living had given her a refined technique. But she had the sense — the kind she sometimes got about things she couldn’t fully articulate — that whatever he wasn’t saying had a reason, and pushing before the reason surfaced wouldn’t make anything clearer.

She picked up her coffee.

He stayed.

He didn’t offer to go. He didn’t elaborate, fill the quiet with more words, or try to help. He just sat, patient, as if he’d decided this was where he was and wasn’t reconsidering.

A vendor dispute broke out at the far end of the square — raised voices, a cart knocked into a stall, nothing serious, but enough noise to draw anyone’s attention. She watched him not look. From where he sat, he had a clear view of the entire incident. His attention didn’t move.

“You make eye contact,” she said, “like a federal investigation.”

“Federal investigations are efficient.”

“That isn’t the part I was objecting to.”

He did not stop looking at her.

This was considerably worse than if he’d said anything. Anything she could have worked with — deflected, matched, or redirected into a joke that sent things somewhere safer. There was nothing to deflect. He kept looking at her with that complete, unhurried focus, as if he’d decided where his attention was going and had no intention of reconsidering.

She noticed the figure because she’d run out of things in his immediate vicinity to look at that weren’t him.

The vendor canopy on the north side of the square — bolts of fabric, handcrafted goods — had a stillness behind it, different from ordinary stillness. Not someone who happened to be standing there. Someone who’d been there a while, paying attention the whole time, the way she could sometimes tell in a meeting when a person was tracking information and waiting for the moment to use it.

The figure stepped back when her magic settled.

Not startled. Not in a hurry. Moving with measured calm, finished with whatever she’d come to do. Not fleeing the scene of a magical incident. Done evaluating it.

She opened her mouth.

Drayce was already looking at that corner of the square.

He’d seen it before she had. She didn’t know how long. His face hadn’t changed in the slightest, giving her nothing to read beyond the fact that he’d clocked it and tucked it away. Whatever he’d concluded, he wasn’t offering it to her.

“That person,” she started.

“I know.” Quietly. Nothing in his voice revealed what he knew or what it meant. He stood and scanned the square like a man making sure he hadn’t missed anything — which, she suspected, he never did.

She gathered the paperwork into the envelope. She did so with care, edges aligned — how she’d always handled documents she didn’t want to look at anymore but couldn’t throw away.