Page 2 of Mane in Finance

"That's a nice story."

"It's not a story, honey. I signed the permits." She catches something in my expression, but before she can chase it, the bell over the door rings behind us.

I look across the street, and standing outside Dodd Outdoor Outfitters with a paper cup in one hand is Kian, the owner. He's doing most of the talking. Six-four, maybe, in a coat that costs more than my car, though you'd have to know coats to know it. He's laughing at whatever Kian said. Then he crouches on the sidewalk to scratch behind the ears of some woman's ancient beagle, and says something to her that makes her wave him off, embarrassed and pleased.

He straightens, looks up, and across two lanes of empty asphalt and a scatter of gold leaves, Lucian Ashcroft's eyes land on mine. They are the strangest color I've ever seen on a person, warm, not cold, like he knows me like we've crossed paths in this lifetime and before. He nods, just a small one, unhurried. Then Kian says something and he turns back, and within three seconds he's a stranger again.

"He's easy to like," Amelia says beside me, amused. "Drives people crazy."

Instead of answering, I think about the four point six billion dollars and sixty-three companies and him crouching on wet pavement for somebody's arthritic dog.

Walking back to the office, I make the decision. I don't take this to my supervisor, or the partners, who golf with half this county. I don't breathe a word of it where three people have keys to my office. Not yet.

Four point six billion dollars is enough to make people nervous, but nervous people destroy evidence, hire lawyers, move money. If I'm going to take Lucian apart, I need something nobody can explain away and nobody can bury.

So I go back upstairs, lock my office door, and start building the file that will eventually go to the feds. Charming men are the easiest to underestimate. I don't intend to make that mistake.

2

LUCIAN

Hector doesn't knock. He's had the code to my study since he was twenty-three years old, and in ten years he's used it to interrupt exactly four things: a board vote, a funeral, my first Christmas as Alpha, and now this.

"You want it standing or sitting?" he asks.

"That bad?"

"Sit down, Luke."

I don't, I put my glass on the sideboard and turn away from the window, where the light is going purple over the ridgeline. Hector crosses the rug with a tablet in one hand. There's a stiffness in his shoulders I've learned to read across a crowded room with twenty years of bad news delivered gently.

"Somebody's inside the ledger," he says. "Not the network. The paper. Three weeks of continuous queries against public filings for Harborlight, Pinecrest, Cedar Bend, eleven of the freight shells, all four of the Montana trusts. Then cross-referenced against county property records. Then against our charitable disbursements."

"Regulator?"

"Worse. Somebody good."

He hands me the tablet. It isn't a warning or a summary. It's a reconstruction, somebody else's work product, pulled from a firm server we monitor as a courtesy to ourselves, and it takes me under a minute to understand that my night is finished.

Whoever built this found the seams. Not the obvious ones. My grandfather designed the freight shells to look boring, and boring is the best camouflage ever invented, but it has a texture, and this person has run a finger along it and felt the stitching. She flagged Cedar Bend because its payroll grew during a quarter when its revenue didn't. That is a small, ugly detail. Twenty auditors have looked at that in thirty years. Not one of them noticed.

"Name," I say.

"Sophie Holt. Thirty-one. Forensic accounting, joined the firm above the bakery three weeks ago." Hector reads from his own screen without inflection, though I know he memorized every line before he walked in here. "Before that, six years in the city breaking apart a commodities fraud that four federal agencies had already given up on. She testified for nine days straight. Defense counsel tried to have her disqualified twice."

"And she came here."

"Yes." He almost smiles. "Bought a used Subaru and a hiking permit. My read? She wanted a quieter life."

"Then we've made a terrible first impression." I scroll. Her notation style is spare, almost rude, all verbs. Doesn't exist. No trucks. Mail drop. Follow it. "Hector, look at the timeline. She got from a routine engagement letter to sixty-three entities in nineteen days."

"I know how long it took her."

"Do you know how long the Treasury working group took in 2011?"

"Fourteen months," Hector says. "Then they closed the file."

Everything in me wants to be furious, and there's no target for it, which is the worst kind. Nine generations of my family have built this. Every dollar Sophie has traced tonight put a roof over a bear clan out of Ohio, or bought a Nevada wolf a birth certificate that keeps her daughter out of a laboratory, or even moved a family across three states with nothing but a duffel bag and forty-eight hours' notice. She has looked at a rescue and seen a crime. Any honest person would.