I came to the Conti compound to bargain with the man who's supposed to kill me.

It is the only sentence I have rehearsed, and I rehearsed it on the F train at four in the morning, looking at the reflection of a stranger in the dark window because I couldn't look at my own face. No sleep since Monday. A typed letter in my bag. A thumb drive on a leather string under my shirt. A pair of low boots I have worn to court for two years, because the only armor I own is paralegal-appropriate, and I wanted to walk in here looking like the kind of woman who is useful.

The brass desk lamp is lit at noon. The radiator clicks twice when it thinks. Don Emilio Conti is reading something he hasn't put down in the time it took the houseman to walk me through three rooms and then leave us alone.

"You're the witness."

A statement, not a question. He read the file before I walked in.

"Yes."

He sets the pen down. The left hand stays where it is. The right hand is the one that moves, the one that lifts the pen, places the cap, sets the cap on the cap-side of the desk where there is a small worn ring of brass shavings from a thousand previous cap-placings. He has done this for years. He looks up at me for the first time, and his face gives nothing until he decides to give it, and he decides, briefly, now.

"Sit."

"I'd rather stand."

The smallest movement at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The thing a smile would replace if he had one. He nods once. He does not insist. The houseman who walked me in is gone. We are alone in a room that has decided things.

I take the letter out. I do not unfold it. I set it on the chipped edge of his desk. He does not look at it.

"Your brother killed Eddie Marchetti in front of me on Monday morning. The police took my statement on Monday afternoon. By Monday evening, the detective who took the statement told me there was nothing he could do, and that I should go home and forget what I saw. I went home. Your brother's people were waiting outside my building. I have been sleeping in my car. I have fourteen hundred dollars cash, a phone with a broken speaker, a job I will lose by Friday, and a federal grand jury date in thirty days that I cannot legally miss without a default warrant."

I say all of it without stopping. I worked on this in the dark window of the F train. I worked on it in the cold doorway of a 24-hour bagel place on Atlantic. I worked on it standing in the cathedral-quiet of the Conti compound's foyer, while the houseman walked off ahead of me to ask if I could come up.

"The state has spent six months building this indictment around my statement. Witness protection for this case is a bullet. Your brother is hunting me. And the only structure in this city that can keep me alive for twenty-eight days without flipping me to the federal channel that will fold under your detective is yours."

He listens. He does not interrupt. The clock on the wall ticks at quarter-seconds because the gears have worn. Outside, a car passes the gate, and the gate hums, and nothing else.

"What am I offering you," I say. I say it as a statement, the way he does. I am borrowing the register because I want him to feel the borrowing. "I am offering you the only thing you respect."

"Which is."

"Leverage."

He looks at the letter on the desk. He does not pick it up. The kept hand stays on the arm of his chair. The other hand turns a half-degree, palm-up, as if he were weighing air. I have read men like this for years. I have watched them sit with widows and partners and clients across rooms paneled in cherry. I have learned what the kept hand means. It means he is not, in this moment, deciding.

"Tell me why I would not have killed you on the way to the train station this morning, Miss Reyna."

I have rehearsed this answer. It is the one answer I have not had to rewrite.

"Because if you wanted me dead, your brother would not be the one looking for me."

The clock ticks. The radiator thinks again.

"Sit," he says.

I sit. He gives me a glass of water, mineral and slightly bitter, in a heavy glass that has weight in my palm. I drink it. He doesn't pour one for himself. He picks up the letter, reads it without a change in his face, and sets it back on the desk on the cap-side, beside the small ring of brass shavings.

"You worked for Sullivan and Park."

"Yes."

"You handled the Diaz appeal."

"Yes."

"You found the contract anomaly that broke the case."

"Yes."

He read me before I walked in. He has not asked me a single thing he doesn't already have an answer to. He is letting me say it for the record. I file the observation. I do not file the second observation, the one about why he is letting me say it, because the second observation is a thing I would rather not have noticed.

"My brother wants you dead," he says. "I am supposed to want you dead too."

"Do you?"

The room holds. Neither of us has decided what comes next. He looks at the chip on the edge of the desk for a beat that lasts too long. The clock fills the silence. The radiator does.

"I haven't decided yet," he says.

I think the line for the first time. Will he kill me before his brother does. I think it without dressing it up, without making it metaphor, without softening it into something I could walk out of the office still believing. The line is exactly what it is.

He stands. He is taller than the brass desk lamp, taller than I expected. He doesn't button his suit jacket. He does not perform. He goes to a sideboard against the south wall, where there is a heavy cherry box that looks like a humidor and is not. He opens it. He takes out a single key on a leather fob and walks back to the desk.

"Thirty days, you said."

"Yes."

"You will stay here thirty days. You will not leave the compound. You will not contact anyone outside it. You will eat three times a day. You will sleep in the east wing in a guest suite. The houseman will show you. Anything you require, you will ask Vera. You will not enter the surveillance room. You will not enter the basement. You will not enter the west wing without permission. At the end of thirty days I will deliver you, alive, to the federal courthouse on the morning of your grand jury appearance."

"And in exchange."

"You will testify truthfully and completely, and you will not perjure yourself to protect me."

"You're not asking me not to give my testimony."

"No."

"You're not asking me to recant."

"No."

I let the word sit on the desk between us, the way he placed the cap on the cap-side. No. Twice. The fear is still in my body. It has been in my body for three days. It has stopped feeling like anything and become simply the room I am in. But I have been terrified for three days, and the body does what bodies do; the fear stops feeling like anything at all and becomes simply the room I am in. This room. With this man. Whose left hand has not moved.

"Don," I say, because I have heard the houseman use the word and I want him to hear me use it. "I appreciate the offer. I have one condition."

He waits.

"If you decide, at any point in the twenty-eight days, that keeping me alive costs you more than killing me, you tell me first. I would rather know."

The smallest movement at the corner of his mouth, again. The thing a smile would replace.

"Miss Reyna."

"Isla."

"Isla. Take the key."

He sets it on the cap-side of the desk. I take the key. The leather fob is worn. The metal is cold. He has walked me through the math without raising his voice once. The kept hand has not moved.

"The houseman will show you to the suite," he says. "We will speak again tomorrow."

I stand. I leave the letter on the desk. He does not call me back. The houseman is already in the doorway.

In the hall, I think the line again. Will he kill me before his brother does. I have walked into a room I know how to read, and I have read a man who is reading me back, and the only thing I am certain of is that the kept hand is not the hand that decides. The kept hand is the hand that is waiting to decide.

The houseman walks me through three rooms and a corridor lined with framed photographs I do not look at, because I am cataloging the doorways instead, and the cameras above them, and the way the runners are pinned at every corner so they cannot be slid sideways and tripped on, and I am cataloging because I do not yet know what else to do. The suite is at the end of the east wing. The door is dark wood, heavy, recently oiled. The houseman opens it. Inside: a bed, a chair, a window that looks at the side of another building, a dressing room, a bathroom. He sets a small white card on the dresser.

"The kitchen is on the ground floor," he says. "Vera will bring you something. Anything you want, you tell her."

"Thank you."

He nods. He goes. The door closes. I hear the bolt slide on his side of the door.

I look at my side of the door.

There is no bolt. Just hardware.

I set the key Don Emilio Conti gave me on the dresser, beside the white card. I sit on the edge of the bed. I do not lie down. I have not yet decided what to do with my hands.

Will he kill me before his brother does.

The clock on the wall in the office ticked at quarter-seconds because the gears had worn. The clock in this room ticks at the half-second, because the clock is newer. The new clock is louder. The old clock kept time. The new clock keeps me awake.