Anton, who had worked for Dimitri Volkov for seven years and had therefore witnessed the full range of his employer's moods, capabilities, decisions, and occasional failures, had developed over that time a precise and carefully calibrated professional relationship with emotional intelligence. He understood it completely. He had studied it the way you studied any useful tool — thoroughly, from multiple angles, with a clear eye for both its applications and its limitations.
He deployed it sparingly. This was deliberate.
In Dimitri's world, emotional intelligence used carelessly was a liability. People who showed too much of what they knew, who let the full extent of their perception be visible, handed information to people who would use it. Anton had no interest in handing anyone information. He had spent seven years being reliably, specifically useful — no more visible than necessary, no less capable than required.
He liked Jane Williams.
He did not say this. Anton did not say things like this. He had no particular objection to the sentiment — it was accurate, and he had a professional appreciation for accuracy — but saying it served no function he could identify, and Anton did not perform actions that served no function.
He demonstrated it, instead, in the way he demonstrated most things: through specific, targeted, practical behaviour. The kind that could not be misread because it was not available for interpretation. It simply was.
He forwarded her security briefings when the situation was elevated. This had been her specific request, made directly to him on a Thursday afternoon in the office when Dimitri had been in a meeting and she had been waiting and had apparently decided that waiting was better used productively. She had asked for the briefings. Dimitri had not arranged this. Anton had assessed the request, determined it was reasonable and that she had both the intelligence to use the information well and the discretion not to misuse it, and had acted accordingly.
He answered her questions directly when she asked them, without routing her through Dimitri for approval. This was, he had noticed, something she specifically appreciated — not being managed, not being handled, being spoken to as someone capable of receiving and processing accurate information. He respected this. He provided it.
He texted her once, unprompted.
This was the action that surprised him slightly, in retrospect — not because it was wrong, but because it was outside his usual parameters. She had been in Bristol visiting her parents for the weekend. A situation had elevated briefly and then resolved — nothing that required her knowledge or action, nothing that affected her directly. But she would have noticed, eventually, the increased communication traffic, the subtle changes in Dimitri's availability. She would have worried without context.
Anton had looked at his phone for approximately ninety seconds. Then he had texted: All fine. D wouldn't want you to worry.
He had not mentioned this to Dimitri.
She had mentioned it to Dimitri.
Jane had told him about the text on the following Tuesday, producing her phone and showing him with the expression of someone presenting evidence they found both touching and slightly amusing. Dimitri had looked at the screen. He had looked at Anton with an expression that Anton catalogued as approximately fifty percent genuine surprise — the specific surprise of someone who had underestimated a person they thought they knew completely — and fifty percent something else that Anton chose not to label precisely because labelling it felt like an overstep.
It might have been gratitude. Anton filed it under probable gratitude and moved on.
"You like her," Dimitri said to Anton, some days later. He said it in the tone of someone making an observation rather than asking a question — which was accurate, because it was not a question, it was a statement of something he had concluded and was now placing on the table to see what happened.
"She has good strategic instincts," Anton said, without looking up from his files. "She identified the second-order consequence in the Brennan situation before I did, and I had considerably more information. And she makes you functional in ways that are professionally useful. You make fewer decisions based on incomplete information when she is involved. Your judgment is improved by her presence."
"That's not an answer," Dimitri said.
"It's the answer I'm giving," Anton said. He turned a page. "She also texted me to say thank you after the Bristol message, which was unnecessary and which I appreciated. That's all I'll say."
He returned to his files with the deliberate attention of a man who had said exactly what he intended to say and had nothing further to add.
Dimitri looked at the closed door for a long moment after Anton had returned to his work. He thought about the specific, quiet way in which Jane had accumulated people — not by trying, not by performing, not by any of the usual mechanisms. Simply by being consistently, precisely herself in a world that was not used to people who did that without agenda.
Irina with her soup. Natasha with her cautious, earned acknowledgment. Anton with his security briefings and his one unprompted text.
He thought about all of them finding something worth finding. Taking careful, quiet stock of her and concluding the same thing he had concluded, from their own angles and in their own languages.
He already knew what they were finding.
He'd been finding it himself since a charity gala in Kensington, in a blue dress, over a canapé she'd found disappointing and eaten anyway because she didn't want to waste it.
He had known then, even if he hadn't had the words for it yet.
He went back to work.