Page 4 of Tell Me Why (Tell, The Detective #5)

Tell looked at Isabella, and Tina wondered if he wasn’t trying to figure out what the woman saw in Daryll. Isabella cleared her throat and stepped forward, resting her fingertips on the desk as she looked Tell in the eye.

“He’s brought us another opportunity, Daryll,” she said. “It is a path of communication with one of your competitors. He can bring us clues about how things are going with Perceval. I didn’t even know that he cared about the trade.”

“Of course he does,” Daryll said, finally pulling out his chair and sitting down.

“He decided five years ago that it was trendy and he jumped in. Probably hasn’t even made a profit yet, from what he paid to get everything up and running.

Trying to shoulder me out ahead of time, now. How did he know where you were?”

Tell shook his head.

“I haven’t the first idea,” he said. “Clearly your organization has a leak. I haven’t spoken to him…” He shrugged like he didn’t even know when he’d last seen him.

“Is his hair always that color?” Tina asked, and Isabella turned her face away as she tried to contain the abrupt laugh.

“I have no idea how he does it,” Isabella said. “It’s been that color as long as I’ve known him.”

Daryll looked mildly infuriated that they were able to laugh about it.

“Is that all?” Tell asked, bored. “I’m late to start, and I’ve got people waiting on me, I’m sure.”

Daryll shook his head, too angry to just let it go.

“Go home,” he said. “I’ll double your guard. I need to think. And I don’t want you here while I do it.”

Tell sighed, then nodded and stood.

“I have people getting on planes this week,” he said. “Ones who know how things work. I would rather you not embarrass me by leaving me behind schedule and unprepared for their arrivals.”

“You let me worry about that,” Daryll said. “They work for me, not you. You’re just here to go show your fancy face where I say we’re going to go sell.”

Tell was an attractive man. He had good bone structure, if nothing else. But Tina found it laughable almost to the point of uncontainable that someone would call him fancy-faced. He was scruffy on purpose.

Defiantly scruffy.

His face didn’t wiggle, even as Tina struggled.

Instead, he sighed.

Looked at Isabella.

“You thought we’d run away,” he said. “That I had betrayed you, whether to someone else or just by being bored and unreliable. It’s making you irrational and short-witted.

I’ll give you time to recollect yourself.

” He looked back at Daryll. “But please understand that there’s only so much foolishness I’ll put up with before I really will just leave. ”

“That isn’t… you leave, you’ll regret it,” Daryll said. Tell raised an eyebrow, then stood.

“Please give my apologies to my appointments today,” he said. “This level of unprofessionalism is not how I want to be perceived.”

He went to open the door, and Daryll stood.

“You be where I can find you,” he said.

“Your guards failed,” Tell said. “I was taken under plausible threat of violence.”

“You don’t just leave,” Daryll said. “You can go when I say you can go. I get any idea that you’re going to try to vamoose, I’ll bring her back here to stay until you’re done.”

Oh, good. Tina was the hostage again.

That seemed about right.

Tell had made it to the door, his hand on the doorknob, and he turned back, his fingers lingering on the door as he considered Daryll.

“I never did like you,” he said. “I found you in possession of an opportunity that I thought might be interesting. If you could refrain from talking me back out of it, I’d appreciate it. I hate to be wrong.”

He dipped his head, then opened the door for Tina, letting her past him and then closing the door after him.

He smiled.

“Shall we go swimming?”

“I need you to follow Leonard and tell me everyone he talks to after he leaves here in about an hour,” Tell said quietly, his face turned in toward Tina as two of the technicians worked across the room from him.

They’d been here for almost two weeks, now, and Tina didn’t think either of the men in the room with them - Henning and Aleksander - spoke any English, but it was a clever way to get people to have private conversations around you, so she and Tell were both avoiding having important conversations in earshot, when they could avoid it.

“Would you like some tea?” Tina asked, and he nodded.

“That would be good.”

It gave her an excuse to wander the house, so long as she generally made her way toward the kitchen, at the far side of the structure, past Daryll’s office and where a lot of the vampires hung out when they weren’t doing other, more important things.

It was shocking how many men there were, just around, at any given time.

“You’re used to American efficiency,” Tell had teased when she’d pointed it out a few days prior.

“This is European aristocracy. You hang out where the power is because that’s where the opportunities come from.

Daryll doesn’t realize how awkward and inefficient it is, because he likes being the seat of power. ”

“And Crissy?” Tina asked. She was trying not to use the woman’s actual name, even in private, for fear that she would slip up casually when it mattered.

“Clearly she has obvious incentive for them to be there,” Tell said. “Those are the men with links to the rest of the industry, spying on Daryll.”

“They just… sit there and talk and drink,” Tina had said, and Tell shrugged.

“And the minute Daryll does something interesting, they see it and report on it,” he said. “What else would they be doing? Working?”

“Who actually does all of the work?” Tina had asked, and he’d given her a peculiar look.

“Do you want to know anything about it?” he’d asked, and Tina had shaken her head.

No.

No, she wanted to stay as far away from the reality of that as she could.

She’d considered, more than once, making the argument that she was superfluous, here, and a liability, that she ought to leave Tell here on his own to do what he was doing, but the problem was that it was evident even to her how much he was relying on her to be eyes where people didn’t notice.

Isabella hadn’t been kidding when she’d said that they treated women differently.

The fact that she was as young as she was, a woman, and with no clear role in the enterprise meant that they would turn their backs when they saw her, or give her orders for food and drinks and entertainment, or once in a while go so far as to lay hands on her, just to push her around and demonstrate that they considered her to be powerless.

She hadn’t told him, but Tell had smelled on her that someone had touched her, and that had stopped happening immediately after that. He told her that he just had to make it clear that she was more than an accessory, that she was protected.

If something went wrong, it meant that it was more likely that someone would come for her and actively hurt her to lever Tell, but for now, she got at least a minimum level of respect.

She still got them drinks as they called out to her, still sat in with them like a servant, ready for someone to tell her what to do, but no one had twisted her arm behind her back again.

It was like having a cheat code. They’d go sullen and quiet when Tell went past, but after the first week, they’d started treating Tina like furniture.

It wasn’t all that dire.

There were men on the property who were kinder than the others, who knew her name and who smiled when they saw her, but…

“It’s the business, isn’t it?” Tina had asked Tell one night, a week in. “It’s self-selection.”

He’d looked up from his notes, considering, then nodded.

“I suspect you’re right.”

“The rest of them aren’t like that,” Tina said. “The vampires I met in London weren’t like this. I refuse to believe that vampire culture on the continent of Europe is so… misogynist and narcissistic, as uniformly as the bang-up crew Daryll has managed to put together.”

Tell had drawn a thoughtful breath, then went back to what he was doing as he spoke.

“No,” he said. “Not having been there in a long time, you would have to confirm with Hunter, but I would say that they span about the same range as the American vampires you’ve known, or even the London ones. Differences from group to group in what’s most normal, but probably the same range.”

So she didn’t have to write off an entire continent.

That was nice.

But she hated that house.

Every day felt like winding herself up for battle, paying attention to everything, who was talking to who, who they were avoiding and which whispered words she could pick out as she picked up another glass and scrunched a napkin into a ball.

Leonard was an interesting one.

They’d picked out two of Perceval’s people within three days. Tell suspected that there was at least one more, but that the first two didn’t know which one he was. Perceval was a prick, but he was clever enough to keep his assets separate.

Tell didn’t think that Leonard was working for Perceval.

Neither did Tina. Leonard was quiet and observant, sharp-witted.

Perceval didn’t like working with people he thought might be smarter than he was.

Leonard was the kind of man who only worked with people he actually respected, and while it was very clear that Tina was never going to make that list, most of the rest of the clingers weren’t, either.

He liked Tell.

A lot.

Tell had started confiding in him, just daily updates, stuff that would seem too small to take to Daryll, friendly in their cool way, and today Tell intended to talk to him about his plan to bring in a third technician, but he would tip his hand with an order form he was going to leave out that would suggest that they were moving into larger-scale testing.

Combined with the third technician, it would make it look like they were closer to success than Tell had hinted to anyone, yet, and make it look like they were keeping it secret.