Scarlett leaned back, her eyes never leaving his. She looked at him with the unsettling precision of someone reassembling a shattered mirror, each new piece of information she acquired making the picture more intricate, more dangerous, and far more complicated than the version she had constructed in her head.
"The postgraduate program at Valcrest doesn't usually produce people who read forty-page infrastructure contracts as casual Saturday research, Mike," she said. Her voice held a note of genuine fascination, the kind a scientist might reserve for a specimen that suddenly showed signs of unexpected intelligence.
"Most students there are busy trying to figure out how to leverage their parents' connections."
"You're out here dissecting government filings."
"The program is a context," Mike said, his voice steady as he met her scrutiny. "Not a definition."
