Morning meant the door opened at seven and a guard came in with coffee and food, which Mika ignored for exactly nine minutes before he ate it, because spite was a luxury and hunger was a liability.
The coffee was good — genuinely good, not the institutional swill of every holding space he'd ever been in — and he filed that away as information about Romano the way he filed everything: the furniture, the food, the absence of anyone roughing him up through the night. None of it was kindness.
It was all communication. We don't need to hurt you to control you. Mika understood the language. He'd spoken it himself.
He was watching the window — reinforced, three-point alarm, a forty-seven-floor drop that was still theoretically survivable if he had the right equipment, which he didn't — when the door opened again and Romano came in. Different shirt, same jacket, same quality of unhurried certainty.
He had someone with him this time. A bigger man, older by a few years, with a face that had been broken and reset at least once and eyes that didn't like Mika at all, which was fine because Mika didn't like him either.
"My cousin, Dante," Romano said, taking the chair again with that same boardroom ease. "He thinks I should have dealt with you differently last night."
"He's not wrong," Mika said. Dante's expression shifted into something that might have been surprise. He looked at Romano. Romano looked at Mika. "You're agreeing with him," Romano said.
"I'm agreeing that from a strategic standpoint, keeping me alive is a liability." Mika set his coffee down on the table between them and folded his hands over his knee. "I'm a contractor. I don't have a family to threaten. I don't have colleagues who'll panic if I don't check in — my handler already knows I'm burned or she wouldn't be a competent handler. Whatever I know about the Syndicate I won't tell you. And I'll try to escape every opportunity I'm given." He paused. "So yes. He's not wrong."
The silence in the room was a specific kind — the kind where people were recalibrating. Mika was familiar with it. Honesty tended to do that in spaces built for games.
"And yet," Romano said slowly, "you're still telling me this. Why?"
"Because you're going to do what you were going to do regardless of what I say," Mika said. "And I'd rather you do it with accurate information than incorrect assumptions." He met Romano's gaze steadily. "I also want you to know that I know exactly what I'm dealing with. So we don't have to do the part where you try to convince me you're reasonable."
Dante made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a curse. Romano was quiet for a moment, and that precise grey gaze moved over Mika's face the way it had the night before — calibrating, measuring — and Mika held it without expression and ignored the way his pulse picked up by three beats per minute because three beats was irrelevant and he was fine.
"Your file," Romano said finally, opening a tablet and setting it on the table between them. Mika glanced at it. His own Registry profile stared back at him — the false one, the one that had taken eighteen months and a significant amount of Yuna's professional expertise to construct. Age, nationality, known aliases, skill set, designation. Beta. He'd read it so many times it was his own handwriting in his head. He kept his face neutral. "It's thorough," Romano continued. "Unusually thorough for a contractor at your level. Most of the top-tier operators have a lot of gaps. Yours has none."
"I'm careful," Mika said.
"Oh are you," Romano agreed. He turned the tablet back toward himself. "Korean-German, raised in Seoul. Military training records out of Germany — those check out with the Bundeswehr archives, which means someone paid to get them in there. Your medical history is complete through last year. Blood panel, vision screening, annual physicals." He scrolled. "All Beta-consistent markers. Hormone profiles within normal range."
Mika said nothing. His pulse was doing something disciplined and even and entirely under control.
"It's a very good file," Romano said. He looked up. "It's the best forged contractor record I've ever seen."
"Thank you," Mika said, because he wasn't going to confirm or deny and he might as well be polite about it.
Dante said, flatly, "I still think we should shoot him."
"You're welcome to try," Mika said, without looking at him, which he could tell annoyed Dante considerably.
Romano closed the tablet. He leaned back in his chair and considered Mika with the particular quality of attention that Mika was already developing an irritating awareness of — the kind that didn't grab or push, just settled. Like weight. Like something with patience. "The Jeong Syndicate sent you to map this building," he said. "That means they're planning something and they wanted to understand the terrain first. I need to know the timeline."
"I don't know the timeline," Mika said, which was true. Yuna ran his contracts on a need-to-know basis and he hadn't needed to know.
"What do you know?"
"That this coffee is better than anything you deserve credit for and that I want another cup," Mika said.
Dante's hand moved toward something under his jacket. Romano raised two fingers without looking at him and Dante stopped. The economy of that — the absolute certainty that the gesture would work — was more threatening than any weapon in the room. Mika logged it.
"You'll have another cup," Romano said, and there was something so spectacularly unbothered about him that Mika found it genuinely aggravating. He didn't want Romano to be unbothered. He wanted Romano to be frustrated, or rattled, or performing control over actual irritation the way most powerful men did when something wasn't going the way they'd planned. Instead Romano just sat there like Mika was a weather event he was observing with professional interest. "We have time," Romano added. "I'm a patient man."
"Good for you," Mika said.
✦
They left him alone for six hours.
Mika used the time productively. He tested every surface of the room in the first hour — window seams, door frame, ventilation panel, the decorative molding at the ceiling that was, annoyingly, purely decorative. He found two cameras he'd expected and one he hadn't, embedded in the smoke detector casing at the northeast corner. He smiled at it without showing teeth and didn't look at it again, but adjusted his movements accordingly for the remainder of his assessment. He found nothing that would help him leave.
He did find, when he went through the small attached bathroom, that someone had stocked it with toiletries. His size. New toothbrush still in packaging. Soap that cost enough to be offensive. He stood in the bathroom doorway and looked at these objects for a long moment and felt the specific anger of someone who doesn't know how to be comfortable and is being forced into the vicinity of it anyway.
"You Calculating bastard," he said to the room, which had cameras in it and was therefore Romano by proxy.
He showered because he'd been working all night and he wasn't going to let spite keep him grimy. He dressed in his own clothes because there were none others. He sat back down and breathed through the low-grade ache starting behind his eyes that he diagnosed as suppressant withdrawal fatigue — normal at this stage, nothing concerning — and he did not think about the fact that the Nullex patch had forty-eight hours left on it and he had no access to more.
He thought about Yuna instead, and whether she'd moved to extract him or written the contract off. He knew her logic: a burned contractor was a liability. She'd give him seventy-two hours to get himself out before she started distancing from the job. He was already past twelve. He did the math with the cold part of his brain and the math did not particularly comfort him.
At hour seven, Romano came back alone.
He had food — actual food, not a tray — and he set it on the table and sat down in his chair and didn't say anything. Just opened a laptop and appeared to work. Mika watched this for a full two minutes.
"What the fuck are you doing," Mika said.
"Working," Romano said, without looking up. "Eat if you want."
"You're working in my cell."
"It's not a cell." Romano turned a page of something. "A cell doesn't have a Molteni sofa."
Mika looked at the couch. Then back at Romano. "Are you—" He stopped. Started over. "Is this an interrogation technique."
Romano looked up then, and there was that thing again, the not-quite-amusement, the thing that moved through his expression too fast to name. "It's dinner," he said. "I worked late. You're awake." He looked back at his screen. "I find it more interesting to eat with someone than alone."
"Am i your prisoner."
"You're my guest until I decide otherwise," Romano said, and the correction was so mild and so firm at the same time that Mika spent three seconds genuinely unable to come up with a response, which was not something that happened to him. He'd been trained in psychological resistance by some of the most brutal operators in the Seoul circuit. He had held silence through things that would have broken most people in pieces. But this — this specific quality of Romano, the patience and the certainty and the complete absence of performance — this was a different kind of thing and Mika's tools for it were not quite the right shape.
He ate the food because it was good and he was hungry and he wasn't going to starve himself over a principle. Romano worked. The city lay forty-seven floors below them, lit and indifferent. The silence in the room was not comfortable, exactly, but it had an odd quality — it didn't press. Mika was used to silences that pressed.
"You knew we were coming," Mika said, eventually, because the question had been sitting in his chest since the corridor. "Not just that someone was coming. You knew the approach and the timing."
Romano didn't look up. "Yes."
"Someone inside the Syndicate." Not a question.
"I have people in useful places," Romano said simply.
Mika absorbed this. The Syndicate had a leak. Which meant this job had been compromised before it started, which meant Yuna had sent him into a burned contract and either she hadn't known or she had, and neither option was comfortable to sit with. He was good at sitting with uncomfortable things, but this one had the specific weight of betrayal in it, and he'd had enough of that particular weight to know it by texture. He kept his face neutral and filed the anger away somewhere he'd look at later.
"Why are you telling me that," Mika said.
Romano closed his laptop. He looked at Mika directly, and this close — five feet across a table — the grey of his eyes was lighter than it had seemed in the corridor, pale and sharp and very awake. "Because I want you to understand that the Syndicate already burned you," he said. "That file, the extraction protocol, everything Yuna has built around your identity — they can reach it. They already reached this." He paused. "And I want you to think about what that means for your timeline."
Mika held his gaze. Held it, and held it, and felt the suppressant ache pulse behind his eyes and didn't acknowledge it. "It means," he said carefully, "that I work faster."
Romano almost smiled. It didn't reach all the way but it was there, brief and contained, and Mika found himself — against every reasonable impulse he had — wanting to know what the rest of it looked like. He shut that down so fast it didn't even finish forming into a thought.
"Get some sleep," Romano said, standing and collecting his things. "We'll talk in the morning."
"You said that last night," Mika said.
"And here we are." Romano moved toward the door, paused with his hand on the frame. "The sofa's more comfortable than the chair."
"I don't sleep in places I haven't chosen," Mika said.
Romano was quiet for a moment.
Something shifted in his expression — not pity, Mika would have gutted him for pity — but something more considered than that. He looked at Mika with those catalogue eyes and Mika looked back and neither of them said anything, and then Romano said, quietly, "One day you'll choose this one," and left before Mika could decide what the hell to do with a sentence like that.
The lock clicked. The city lights moved beyond the reinforced glass. Mika sat in the chair with the suppressant ache behind his eyes and the smell of Romano's scent still hanging in the air — dark wood, black pepper, something that made the base of his spine do that thing he was not going to acknowledge — and he thought, with cold and meticulous fury, about how to get out of this building.
He sat there until four in the morning.
Then he moved to the couch, because his back hurt and spite was a luxury, and he told himself it had nothing to do with anything Romano had said.
He was an excellent liar. He always had been.