Chapter 4: The Informant's Reward
The fifty-euro note was a stone in his pocket. He’d tried to spend it at lunch, ordering a sandwich he didn’t really want, but the cashier had waved it away. “Too large, monsieur. Don’t you have anything smaller?” He didn’t. He’d shoved it back, cheeks flaming, and used his card.
Now, it was 3:15 PM on Thursday. The post-lunch lull had the office in a gelatinous grip. From his cubicle, Loic saw Mathieu and Julien slip out towards the fire escape, their laughter a low rumble. The third time today. They’d be gone twenty minutes, maybe thirty, leaving their project dashboards blinking, unattended.
A week ago, he would have just bent his head, buried himself in the data models Isabelle had given him. Now, his fingers paused over the keyboard. He wasn’t just doing his job anymore; he was managing an entire vertical. Their work impacted his. Their delays were his delays. He thought of Isabelle’s voice on the phone: I’ll know if you bypass me. She saw everything. She expected him to see everything, too.
It wasn’t snitching. It was accountability. That’s what he told himself, his heartbeat a quick, light flutter in his throat. He opened a new email. Isabelle – A heads-up. The Devrez project timelines might see minor delays due to recurring extended breaks from the junior analysts. Wanted to ensure you weren’t blindsided. He read it over three times, deleted ‘might see minor delays’, replaced it with ‘are incurring risk of delay’. More professional. Less emotional.
He hit send before he could think about it.
The response came not as an email, but as a soft chime from his phone, ten minutes later.
My office. Now.
The two words were a cold splash. He stood, his chair rolling back too fast and bumping the partition. He walked the hall, the muffled sounds of keyboards and phones seeming very far away. Her door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open.
The scene was different today. The blinds were angled to cut the afternoon sun into severe stripes across the rug. Isabelle was half-reclined in her ergonomic chair, which emitted a nearly silent hum as it held her in a perfect, relaxed posture. On the desk, beside her keyboard, was an open takeout container—something with quinoa and roasted vegetables, only half-eaten. It felt strangely intimate, a glimpse of a bodily need so ordinary it seemed at odds with her.
“Close the door.”
He did. The click of the latch was final.
“Sit.”
He took the same chair as before, the one that felt too low. She didn’t move from her recline, just studied him. The silence stretched. He could smell her perfume, the coffee, the faint scent of the food.
“Your email was cautiously worded,” she said finally, her voice neutral. “Mathieu and Julien. How long?”
“Today? Three breaks. Each around twenty-five minutes.”
“And their current output?”
“Their section of the Devrez model is forty-eight hours behind the sprint schedule. They’ve logged blockers, but the comments are… vague.”
She nodded slowly, a satisfied cat. She picked up her fork, pushed the quinoa around the container, and took a single, small bite. She ate with the same precision she did everything else.
“You did the right thing,” she said after swallowing. “Loyalty isn’t about blind allegiance. It’s about ensuring the integrity of the whole. You understand the whole now.”
“I think so,” he said, his voice sounding thin.
“I know so.” She put the fork down, wiped her mouth with a linen napkin from a drawer. “Show me your progress on the pricing model. Section 4.3.”
He’d been prepared for this. He pulled his tablet from his bag, hands steady now, anchored in the work. He moved to stand beside her, holding the screen for her to see. He pointed to the recalibrated algorithms. “The flaw was in the weighting. I redistributed it here, and here, which cascades through these projections…”
As he spoke, she listened, her eyes scanning the numbers. Then, she did something that stopped his breath.
She reached up.
Her hand, cool and smooth, came to rest on the side of his head. Her fingers slid into his hair, just above his temple. It wasn’t a caress. It was an assessment, a possession. She gently turned his head a fraction, guiding his gaze back to a specific data point on the screen as if to say look here. Then her fingers stayed, threading through his hair, combing through it with a slow, rhythmic pressure.
His voice faltered. The numbers blurred. Every nerve ending in his scalp ignited, feeding a single, shocking line of sensation straight down his spine. He was intensely aware of the scent of her skin, the slight scratch of a perfect nail against his scalp, the absolute stillness of her otherwise.
“This correction,” she murmured, her eyes still on the tablet, her voice a low, private thing. “It’s elegant. Efficient.”
Her fingers continued their slow movement. He felt himself leaning, infinitesimally, into the touch. A shiver ran over his shoulders, completely involuntary.
She felt it. He knew she did. A tiny smile touched the corner of her mouth.
“Good boy, Loic.”
The words were soft, matter-of-fact. They sank into him, warm and heavy as poured syrup, spreading through his chest, his gut. Good boy. Praise, so absolute and infantilizing, it should have sparked fury. Instead, it unspooled the last tight knot of tension in his shoulders. A shaky, quiet breath escaped him.
She gave his hair one last, faint tug and removed her hand. The absence was a shock, a sudden cold spot.
“Implement it by end of day,” she said, her tone shifting back to its normal, crisp frequency. She picked up her fork again. “And from tomorrow, you’ll join the 9 AM management sync. Don’t be late.”
Dismissed. He stood, his limbs awkward. He managed a nod, gathered his tablet. He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t.
Back in the fluorescent glow of the open-plan office, the world seemed too loud, too bright. He sat down, his hands trembling now that they were unobserved. The phantom feeling of her fingers in his hair was tattooed on his scalp. He could still hear the two words, looping in his head.
He opened the pricing model file, the numbers sharp and clear. He worked. He worked with a focus that felt like a fever, a driven, silent intensity. When Mathieu and Julien slunk back in, smelling of smoke and cool air, they didn’t glance his way.
He didn’t glance at them either. He was elsewhere. He was in a sunlit room with the taste of praise in his mouth, a taste both sickly and sweet, and he was already, desperately, wondering what he would have to do to taste it again.