That stillness is why he hasn't been excited to bring this up. He knows that Louis can be violent. He knows Lestat can be very violent. To him, past his initial confusion and panic at being left alone with Armand in another inescapable room, the act of leaving Armand alive and intact after an initial hard physical rebuke, was a good move. A threat of leveled but nothing meted out. Not ending another relationship with a horrorshow of brutality.

Perhaps it's a childish desire. Daniel doesn't want anyone to get into a fight. He doesn't want to see anybody laid up in a coffin for weeks. He doesn't want to know what happens when one of them really gets into it with Armand. Louis wants a fight and Armand is creeping around testing boundaries. He takes a breath.

"Before we got to New York. I had tracked down the firm handling his US business investments," because it was easy to do, knowing the names of Louis' holdings now, and a handful of their current aliases, "and left him a message. Which was weird. The person who took it was very gracious, like they'd been told somebody with my name would call eventually. And then the guy who got me banned from Random House eligibility in 2003 was stuck in the VIP green room of the convention center in Boston when I showed up."