The Fixer Has Terrible Bedside Manners

How it begins

Dante Voss had bought the wrong tea.

Lina found six boxes in the safe-house kitchen, all expensive, all unsuitable for the woman waiting upstairs with a headache and no patience for being grateful.

“Did you ask her?”

Dante stood beside the back door.

“I bought a selection.”

“That wasn't the question.”

He looked at the boxes as though the problem might be solved by choosing a more expensive one.

Lina remembered him in a different room, three years earlier, explaining why a frightened witness should consider the consequences of being difficult. She had reported the conversation. His employers called it a misunderstanding. He called it nothing at all.

Now he had been hired to help protect another adult witness while an independent inquiry examined the same network.

Lina had accepted the work only after confirming the woman could leave, contact outside support and refuse any member of the team.

Including him.

“I know you don't trust me,” Dante said.

“Then we have one useful point of agreement.”

Above them, a door opened.

The witness called down for ordinary black tea and a charger with the correct connection. Dante reached for his coat.

“Wait,” Lina said.

He stopped.

She wrote both requests on a piece of paper.

“And the shop receipt.”

“You expect me to get that wrong too?”

“I expect the person spending somebody else's money to account for it.”

For a moment anger sharpened his face. Lina did not soften the instruction.

Then he took the paper.

Outside, rain struck the small kitchen window. The house was warm, the doors worked and nobody was locked in a room for their own supposed benefit. These were modest facts. In her experience, they mattered more than declarations of protection.

Dante paused at the threshold.

“Anything for you?”

The question sounded unfamiliar in his mouth.

Lina considered it.

“Come back with what she asked for.”

He nodded, and left without improving the request.