Page 4 of You, Only You

"I'm aware."

I ended the call and pulled up the security feeds on my secondary monitor. The grid of black-and-white images filled the screen: lobby, hallways, library, conference rooms. My eyes went to Conference Room B immediately.

She was there. Alone at the long table, surrounded by neat stacks of folders. Her dark hair was still in that severe bun, her posture rigid even with no one watching. The afternoon light seeped through the windows, but she didn't seem to notice the view. Her entire being was focused on the documents in front of her.

Threat assessment. Profiling an opponent's methodology. Standard operational intelligence.

The justification sounded thin even inside my own head, but I let it stand.

I watched her for an hour. She didn't fidget. Didn't get up to pace or stretch. Didn't pull out her phone or stare vacantly at the skyline the way most people did when they thought they were alone. She turned pages methodically, made notes on her tablet, and cross-referenced documents with a rhythm that was almost hypnotic.

Then she paused.

Her hand froze over a file I recognized, the Marcus Webb deposition from the Harrington case. Three years old. Buried in a box of routine discovery documents. There was nothing obviously damning in it, but it referenced a shell company I'd used to funnel evidence to a journalist. The connection was tenuous, almost invisible.

She'd found it in four hours.

"Damn," I breathed.

She made a note on her tablet, her expression unchanged, and moved on to the next document. But I saw the slight tension in her shoulders now. The focused intensity of someone who'd caught a scent and was following the trail.

Most auditors would have missed that file entirely. Most auditors hadn't spent their formative years inside a financial crime, learning to recognize the architecture of deception before they learned how to drive.

My phone buzzed against the desk, a soft, specific tone I'd assigned to only one person. The screen lit up with Nicole's photo.

I answered immediately, turning my chair away from the monitor and the woman on it.

"Hey, Nic."

"You picked up on the first ring." Her voice was warm but knowing. "That's either really good or really bad."

"Can't I just be happy to hear from my sister?"

"You can. You never are." A pause. "What's wrong?"

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Three hundred miles away, and she could still read me like a book. "State bar audit. Standard procedure."

"Will."

One word. My name, weighted with seven years of shared history. She knew about the hunting. Not the details, I'd never burden her with those, but the context of it. The purpose. She'dfigured it out three years ago and hadn't asked me to stop. She'd just asked me to be careful.

"Is it about what you do?" she asked quietly.

"It's handled."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have right now." I softened my voice, letting the mask slip the way I only could with her. "The auditor is... competent. More competent than I expected. But I've prepared for competence."

"You've prepared for everything." There was a smile in her voice now, fond and slightly exasperated. "Remember when you made contingency plans for my junior prom?"

"Derek Morrison had a reputation."

"He was seventeen and terrified of you."

"As he should have been." Something in my shoulders loosened. Not much. Enough. "How's the museum rebrand going?"

She accepted the deflection gracefully, she always did, and launched into a description of her latest graphic design project. A client who kept changing the color palette. A committee that couldn't agree on a font. The satisfaction of finally nailing a logo that captured both "modern accessibility" and "historical gravitas."