Page 10 of Mane in Finance

She works for six hours. I bring her food she doesn't eat and water she drinks, and I sit across from her and pull the files she calls for. In the fourth hour I stop being her most hated person and become her assistant, but we don't mark the moment it happens.

She goes still over a column, and I know that stillness now. It means she's found something that isn't good.

"Lucian." Her voice has changed. "The Wexourt skim. I thought it started two years ago, when the surveillance did." She turns the ledger so I can see. "It didn't. It started eleven years ago. It's the same signature the whole way down. Whoever this is didn't get impatient recently. They've been bleeding you a long time. The surveillance is new. The theft is ancient."

Eleven years. My father was still alive eleven years ago. He signed some of these pages. The thought arrives with a cold that's unrelated to the vault.

"That's not a rogue employee," I say. "That's someone who's been here the whole time."

"That's someone who watched your father die and kept skimming through the funeral." She closes the ledger gently, at odds with the words. "I'm sorry. I know that's not…"

The vault phone rings. It only rings for one reason. Hector's voice comes through flat and fast. "Larkspur's gone."

I've stood up before I decide to. Larkspur is a safe house in the Cascades, three families, a wolf pack's worth of children whose parents died in a raid last spring. It is one of nineteen locations that exist only in the room I am currently standing in.

"Gone how."

"Hit two hours ago. Coordinated. They knew the layout, Luke. The back door and the evac route and they had both covered before our people moved. Four out. Six taken." A pause I feel in my teeth. "Nobody outside this vault has Larkspur's evac route. Nobody."

I set the phone down. Sophie is watching my face rearrange itself.

"It's not just theft," she says quietly. "They're not only stealing your money. They're selling your people. Whoever's in your ledger is handing the syndicate your safe houses one at a time."

"Six people." My voice comes out wrong. "Children, Sophie. I signed the papers that were supposed to keep them…"

"Stop." She's on her feet, around the table, and she puts a hand flat on my chest, which no one has done in years and I permit it only because I can't seem to move. "Not that. Not the spiral where you carry all of it. You don't have time to grieve efficiently and neither do they. What you have is me, and a room full of the exact records that will tell us who sold Larkspur. So we use it. Right now. Grieve later, on my schedule, when the kids are home."

I glance at her hand on my chest, then her face, fierce and certain and inches from mine. Her breath bushes my lips, her lips look soft, almost inviting. I feel the need to kiss her, but she interrupts my thoughts.

"I'm coming with you," she says. "Whatever the next move is. Don't waste breath telling me to stay here. I'm the one who can read what'll find them, and I'm not doing it from a safe distance while you have all the fun getting shot at."

"It's not fun."

"I know, but I'm coming anyway."

Every instinct I have says protect her, hide her, keep the one irreplaceable thing off the board. I've run this pride on that instinct for ten years, carry it alone, spend myself first, let no one stand where the danger is.

I look at Sophie with her hand over my heartbeat and her chin at that impossible angle, and the instinct loses.

"Alright," I say. "Partners. But you follow my lead when the shooting starts."

"I'll follow your lead when it's about avoiding getting shot." She takes her hand back, and I miss the weight of it immediately. "You follow mine when it's about money. Those are the terms."

"Okay," I agree, and I mean it, and Hector, listening on the open line, makes a sound that's almost a laugh and definitely a surrender.

9

SOPHIE

I've ignored the names behind the theft and followed only where the stolen money goes. The internal leak is already established. What we don't know is what happens to the money after it leaves Ashcroft's system.

I've got three monitors open in the vault anteroom and every Wexourt diversion a forensic accountant would ever want to disappear into. Lucian sits beside me while I strip away Ashcroft Holdings entirely and concentrate on the destination accounts.

"We already know someone inside your organization is feeding them information," I say. "Now I want to know what they're buying with your money."

Lucian nods once. "Find it."

We work past midnight, and in the small hours the investigation stops being his ledgers and my expertise and becomes just us against a wall of numbers, passing coffee back and forth, finishing each other's sentences in the shorthand that's grown between us.