The guests began to whisper. One woman touched her diamond necklace. Another man glanced at the original Picasso hanging behind the bar. It was a trick question, surely. Was it the real estate? Was it the collective net worth of the people? Vance watched Annie, waiting for her to stumble. Waiting for her to point to the painting or his watch. He was ready to ridicule her shallow understanding of value. Annie did not look at the painting. She did not look at the jewelry. She stood perfectly still, her expression shifting from fear to something colder. Something harder. She looked Sebastian Vance dead in the eye, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
“Do you really want me to answer that, Sebastian?” she asked. She did not call him sir. She did not call him Mr. Vance. She used his first name. The silence that followed was not just quiet. It was dangerous. The use of his first name hung in the air like smoke from a snuffed candle. The jovial atmosphere of the vault room evaporated instantly. The smiles on the faces of the socialites froze, transforming into masks of confusion and unease.
Sebastian Vance did not blink. For a second, a flicker of genuine shock crossed his face, a crack in the porcelain veneer of his composure. But he plastered it over with a sneer of dismissal. He laughed, but it was a dry, hollow sound that did not reach his eyes. “Sebastian?” Vance repeated, looking around the table as if to share the joke. “It seems our waitress has had a bit too much of the fumes from the kitchen. Security.” “You asked me a question,” Annie interrupted. Her voice was not loud, but it possessed a strange, resonant authority that overrode his. She took a step closer to the table, her posture shifting. The slump of the subservient worker vanished. Her spine straightened, her chin lifted. She looked like a queen in a pauper’s uniform. “You put one hundred thousand dollars on the table for the truth. Are you withdrawing the offer because you’re afraid of the answer?”
Vance’s hand hovered over the button under the table that would summon his personal security detail. He paused. His ego was his Achilles’ heel. If he called security on a petite waitress, he would look weak in front of his peers. He would look like a man who could not handle a girl. “I fear nothing,” Vance spat, leaning back and crossing his arms. “By all means, entertain us. Tell me, little girl, what is the most expensive thing in this room?”