Page 8 of Mane in Finance

We step outside afterward, and Sophie stands at the rail of the porch and glances out at the trees for a while before she speaks.

"I built a case that would have found this place," she says quietly. "A federal agent would've walked up that road with a warrant and a good conscience and handed that little girl to whoever took the bear clan's son." She turns to me, and her eyes are wet, level and terrible. "I've always believed the numbers don't lie. I just couldn't read the language they were written in."

"Now you can." I keep my voice low. "So read it with me. Find the ones who sent last night's crew. I don't need protecting from you. I actually need you."

She wipes her face with her bandaged hand, annoyed at herself, and gives me a look I'm starting to recognize. Half challenge, half admiration.

"Okay, Ashcroft," she says. "But we do it my way. Full access, no locked drawers. And when I question anything, you answer it even when you don't want to."

"Agreed. Come on. We've got a syndicate to find, and you owe that little girl a better world than the one you almost handed her."

7

SOPHIE

Iask Lucian for a whiteboard and he gives me a wall in a room off his study, twelve feet of it, and by the third day I've covered it in large paper and colored string and the particular chaos that means my brain is finally working again. Rebuilding the file from memory should be impossible. It isn't, quite. I've stared at those transactions for weeks. They're printed on the inside of my skull, and the fireproof bag holds the master copy the crew never got, so I have my spine to build the ribs back onto.

"You memorized all those entities," Lucian says from the doorway. He's been bringing me coffee and pretending he's not involving himself. "Account numbers included."

Somewhere between rebuilding the file and covering Lucian's wall in string, I sent my resignation to the firm. I keep the explanation deliberately boring: personal emergency, immediate effect, apologies all around. Rhoda replies within minutes asking whether I'm safe. My supervisor replies eleven minutes after saying the door is open if I ever want to come back. I don't tell either of them what really happened. The less they know, the safer they stay.

"I memorized the shape. Numbers are easy once you stop trying to remember them as numbers." I don't turn from the wall. "Harborlight always pays on the ninth. Cedar Bend rounds to the nearest fifty. Everybody's got a tell. Your grandfather was good, but he had human tendencies too, and they repeat themselves."

"That's either brilliant or deeply unsettling."

"It's both. Hand me the red pen."

He does, and he stays, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, watching me work with an attention I've decided not to examine too closely. It's been like this for days. We argue about method, he wants to lead with the last attack, I lead with the money, and I keep winning because I'm right. But the arguing has changed. It's lost its edge and picked up something else, a rhythm, the back-and-forth of two people who've figured out the other one can keep up.

Once the week ends, I find the thing I've been circling.

"Come here. Look. Every dollar in your network moves downhill and stays in the system. Rescue to safe house to identity to relocation, closed loop, nothing leaks. Except here." I tap a node three layers deep, a logistics firm called Wexourt that I'd flagged weeks ago and dismissed. "Wexourt takes a legitimate transfer from one of your shells. Standard. But then a slice of it, small, always under the reporting threshold, goes out. To accounts that aren't yours and aren't hidden the same way. Yours hide to protect. These hide to steal."

Lucian crosses to the wall, and I feel the warmth of him at my shoulder before I see him there. He studies the node.

"Wexourt is ours," he says slowly. "We've used them for eight years."

"Wexourt is yours on the surface. Somebody inside your operation is using your own courier to skim, and the skim doesn't go into a pocket. Watch where it lands." I trace the string. "It aggregates. It pools. Then it moves again, and it buys things your network would never buy. Surveillance contracts. Two private security firms. A data broker." I finally turn to him. "Lucian, someone is using your money to fund the people hunting you. You've been paying for your own surveillance for years."

Something moves behind his eyes that belongs to the lion I saw come down those stairs.

"That's not possible," he says. "The number of people with that level of access…"

"Is small. I know. That's the good news." I cap the pen. "It means we're not looking for a needle in a haystack. We're looking at a very short list of people you trust to have handed the keys. Someone inside Ashcroft Holdings has been feeding a second organization for years, and they were careful right up until they got impatient enough to send a crew after an auditor. They made a mistake with me. Impatience is a mistake."

Lucian stares at the wall for a long stretch. This is the part I hate about my work, the moment someone realizes the betrayal is domestic, that the wound came from inside the house. I've delivered this news to CEOs and widows and a nun once, and it hits everyone the same every time, that particular collapse of a person recalculating everyone they've ever trusted.

"You need to eat," I say. "You've been running on coffee and rage for three days. It'll make you stupid, and I need you smart."

That surprises a laugh out of him. "You need me smart."

"For the investigation." I busy myself with the pens. "Don't make it weird."

We eat late, in the kitchen, because the dining room feels like a museum and neither of us says so. It's the first meal since the attack that isn't a strategy session, and the quiet is different than it was, comfortable, that makes me nervous.

"Ask me something," he says, out of nowhere. "You've been auditing me for a week. You must have questions that aren't about money."

"I have one." I push a piece of bread around my plate. "You could live anywhere. New York. London. A private island with a landing strip. You're a billionaire with a jet and a hidden lion underneath, Lucian, the world is genuinely your oyster. Why this town?"