Neo did not answer at once.

Her question had come out simple, almost elegant, but there was nothing simple in it. She was not asking whether Leo annoyed him, or whether he came across as arrogant. She wanted the real thing. The first instinct. The ugly one. The part people usually kept inside.

’So that’s what this was.’

He rested one forearm on the table and studied her across the plates and the citylight. The teasing had thinned from her voice. It had not vanished entirely, because that seemed stitched into her by now, but something colder had stepped forward and taken its place.

"What do you want to know exactly about him?" Neo asked.

Vivienne lowered the glass and turned it once by the stem before letting it go. "Leo is a Duplain," she said, and the sentence carried more contempt than emphasis. "That already makes him worth paying attention to. His family kept him hidden. Not from everyone, of course. People like me knew he existed. But the world at large did not. Families like the Duplains are careful about what they reveal and even more careful about what they don’t."

She leaned back slightly, one hand crossing over her lap, the pendant at her throat catching a pale line of light from the windows. "Their public face is polished. Refined. Generous when cameras are on them. Their private face..." Her mouth curved without warmth. "Less beautiful. I want to know whether Leo did anything strange in that Breach. Anything beyond what a selfish bastard would do by instinct."

Neo kept quiet.

He knew enough already.

He had met two Duplains within a few months. One was Roderic, a grown man with enough weight behind his name to make problems disappear or bury them. The other was Leo, his age, his family’s younger rot given a neat face and expensive clothes. They shared blood. That much showed. Similar bone structure. Similar coloring. Yet the difference between them was just as clear. Roderic had the calm patience of someone used to moving pieces on a board. Leo had greed humming right on the surface.

If Leo told his older brother anything useful about him, things could turn ugly very quickly.

Vivienne watched him through that silence. She had the focus of someone sorting through fragments and deciding which one mattered.

"From your expression," she said at last, "I’d say you’ve had previous business with the Duplains. Not only Leo."

Neo’s gaze hardened. "Why do you think that?"

"Because I spent money."

The answer came so easily that for a second it irritated him more than if she had tried to be subtle.

Vivienne rested her chin against two fingers and continued, "Money buys information. That is one of its few virtues. I know you came out of a Zone 0. I know your trail before that is thin in a way that doesn’t happen naturally. I know there was an incident a few months ago. Never made public. A death that should have stayed one more corpse in one more bad district, except it didn’t."

Neo’s face stayed unreadable.

"That means nothing," he said. "People die in Zone 0 every day. Over bread. Over territory. Over someone taking a bad step into the wrong street. Over a glance. Death is ordinary there."

Vivienne gave a small nod. "Yes. Which is exactly why a cover-up becomes interesting. If the government bothered to bury it properly, there was a reason. I dug a little more. Roderic Duplain was in the area looking for something." Her voice lowered slightly. "And the man who died there was known to my family."

That caught him.

The old man and the Mournes?

Neo’s brows drew together before he could stop them. "The old man knew the Mournes?"

Vivienne’s smile returned at once, small and satisfied.

"Oh," she said softly. "So we’ve reached the part where you confirm things for me. Good. And calling him old man means you were close."

Neo’s mouth flattened. "Wait. You just played me."

"I nudged you."

"You lied."

Vivienne lifted one shoulder, almost graceful enough to pass for innocence. "Not exactly. I never knew him myself. My parents did. I found old documents with his name in them. That part is true. The part where you know him as more than a line in a file..." Her smile deepened a fraction. "That was fortunate."

Neo clicked his tongue under his breath.

’Dangerous.’

That word fit her better than any of the others he had used in his head so far.

Sixteen or not, she was still a Mourne. That meant old enemies, quiet knives, people trying to use her, people trying to kill her, people bowing in front of her while sharpening something behind their backs.

A girl raised inside that would not reach this age by being soft, and she definitely would not sit alone at the top of a tower-restaurant with half the city below her if all she had was beauty and a surname.

Vivienne saw enough in his face to know she had gone far enough.

"Answer me about Leo first," she said, her tone smoothing out. "We can come back to your old man later."

Neo let the silence stretch a little, partly because he wanted to make her wait, partly because he was deciding how much to give.

He could lie.

He could say Leo was arrogant, reckless, greedy, and leave it there. That would have been safer. But that was not why he came. She had paid him, yes, but beyond that, Leo mattered. If someone like Vivienne was willing to push this hard for information, maybe there was value in letting one more dangerous person know exactly what sort of filth he was.

"Alright," Neo said. "My turn to complete the agreement."

Vivienne didn’t interrupt him after that.

Neo told her what Leo had done inside the tower. He gave it to her the way it deserved to be given, stripped of decoration. Leo hid information. Took advantage of everyone’s fear. Entered the tower before the others, learned things in advance, kept quiet, and let the rest stumble through danger he already understood. When the boss room opened up and the pressure rose, he did worse. He used what he knew, abandoned people to die, and treated the lives inside that place like a pile of Soul Cores waiting to be harvested once the room emptied itself for him.

He kept his voice even the whole time.

He did not need to sharpen it. What Leo had done was foul enough without help.

Vivienne changed while she listened.

At the start, there had still been traces of the woman from earlier, the one who smiled too easily and found amusement in pulling at him just to see what would happen. Those traces disappeared one by one. The playfulness left first. The brightness went after it. What stayed behind was colder than either of them. Her hand tightened around the stem of the glass. The silver pendant at her throat rose and fell once with a deeper breath. By the time Neo finished, there was fury in her face, plain and unhidden.

"That son of a bitch," she said, the words coming out quiet enough to make them worse. She shook her head once, as if the full shape of it had still offended some buried part of her sense even after hearing it laid out cleanly. "To let that many people die for a handful of cores..." Her jaw set. "Disgusting."

Neo watched her across the table.

"You sound surprised."

Vivienne gave him a hard stare. "I’m not surprised he’s rotten. I’m surprised he went that far in a place where surviving witnesses existed."

"Maybe he didn’t think they would."

Her mouth pressed into a thin line.

"That sounds more like him."

She lifted the glass, stopped halfway, and put it back down untouched. Her anger did not spill outward in a dramatic way. It stayed controlled, which made it heavier. This wasn’t rage thrown for show. This was personal.

Neo noticed that.

"You hate him."