Page 3 of Mane in Finance

She's honest. It's clear all over the file. She isn't building leverage, or shopping this to anybody who'd pay for silence. She's building something meant to survive a courtroom.

"She hasn't gone to her partners," I say slowly.

Hector's eyes narrow. "No. She hasn't."

"She's a new hire sitting on the biggest file of her career and she hasn't told a single senior in her own firm."

"Which means she doesn't trust them."

"Which means she's smarter than her situation." I pick up my glass. "Hector, run it backwards. Pull six months of queries on our filings. Is hers the only set?"

Something behind Hector's face shuts down into pure arithmetic. For half a second there's no man standing in my study at all.

"I'll find out tonight," he says.

By two in the morning, he calls me. There's a second pattern. Older than hers. Slower, more careful, run through commercial data brokers so it never touches a subpoena. Somebody has been outside our windows for years, taking notes, waiting for a light to come on. Sophie just turned on every light.

"They'll see her before we can hide her," Hector says. "If they haven't already."

"Then she isn't a problem." I'm surprised by how steady I sound. "She's a target."

On Saturday I go into town. The market's set up along the block by the old feed store. I buy squash, and Kian is loading crates of cider into somebody's truck bed with his sleeves shoved up. He catches my eye with a question in it.

She's at the second stall from the corner, negotiating about apples. Cheerfully, with the pale-haired woman who's run that stand since before I inherited anything. Sophie holds one up to the light like she's auditing it. Whatever she says makes the woman laugh so hard she has to set down her cash box. Sophie pays full price anyway. Then she stands there talking for another five minutes, and listens more than she talks.

I watch her no longer than I'd watch anyone. A predator who stares gets remembered. Still, I catalog her: boots broken in from real use, a canvas bag stamped with a bank logo from the city she left, tension carried high across her shoulders.

She glances up, the same as yesterday when she was in the café, and finds me before I've moved. Twice in two days. Most people never manage it once. Her expression isn't fear, and it isn't the pleasant blankness this town aims at me. It's suspicion, held perfectly level, aimed like a rifle. I nod. She doesn't. She turns back to her apples with her chin up, and I feel a laugh working somewhere under my ribs.

When I reach the car, I've made the decision I've been circling since Hector walked into my study, and I call him.

"Full watch," I tell him. "Rotating, three deep, nobody she'd recognize twice. She doesn't see us, or feel us. If she notices anything, she'll bolt or she'll report it, and either one puts her in the open."

Hector doesn't like it. He never likes anything that spends pride resources on a human. "And if she finishes that file first?"

"Then we'll deal with the federal government." I open the door. "I'd rather explain myself to a grand jury than bury her."

3

SOPHIE

I've become the kind of person who backs up everything three ways, so tonight I'm doing exactly that. Two thumb drives, one cloud vault under a name that isn't mine, and a printed master copy I keep in a fireproof document bag under the bed like some conspiracy theorist. It's Tuesday, and I've got the file spread across my kitchen table, the bright lamp on, a mug of tea going cold because I forget to drink anything once I'm inside the numbers. The Cedar Bend payroll anomaly finally cracked open an hour ago. I found the mirror account. I know how they move it now, and now I can prove who, it's over.

My lights go dark, not a flicker, not the blackout the whole block gets when the wind comes down off the ridge. Every bulb in the apartment dies at once, and half a breath later so does the hum of the refrigerator, and the little green clock on the microwave, and the router's blue eye in the corner, total darkness. My whole body understands it before my brain does, the same knowledge that stops you at the top of a dark staircase.

I reach for my document bag first, evidence before self, and my hand's still under the bed frame when I hear the deadbolt turn, my deadbolt, the one I paid a locksmith to upgrade my second week here, and then two sets of footsteps come in over my threshold with the unhurried confidence of men who checked the floor plan first.

"Kitchen table," one says. Flat. Bored. "Get the drives."

I'm already moving. There's a fire escape off the bedroom window, but the frame's swollen from the damp and it shrieks when I haul it up, and one voice notices.

"She's here. Back bedroom."

I climb out the window with the master copy zipped against my chest and one boot on, drop the last six feet into the alley, and fall on my ankle that never fully forgave me for a trail run last spring. Pain white-outs my vision, but I run on it anyway. Behind me a man's head peeks through the window like he does it for a living, no grunt, no fumble, and that detail is what finally scares me all the way through, these aren't burglars startled off a score. These are professionals.

Main Street at eleven p.m. is closed, gold-lit and empty. The pumpkins are stacked outside the hardware store. The cider-donut chalkboard's still there, cheerful, obscene. I cut behind the café where Amelia bought me coffee, through the little service lot, past the dumpsters, and I hear their muffled voices in the distance, it is much worse than shouting, just splitting up, the sound of a plan. One's on the street, one's pacing me through the alleys, herding, and that's obvious because every fence I hit is on my left, funneling me toward the tree line at the town edge where there are no lights, no witnesses, and no cameras.

I stop funneling, and cut right instead, straight across someone's dark backyard, over a chain-link that splits my palm, into the woods on my own terms. The forest here drops fast toward the creek. I've hiked this already, I know the route in daylight, all switchbacks and root-steps, but at night it's just black and loud with my own breathing. I'd still rather gamble on terrain I've walked than on open pavement with two professionals.