Page 9 of Mane in Finance

He considers the question like it deserves a real answer, which I'm learning he does with everything.

"My father moved us here when I was six. The pride had been in Chicago for a generation, and it was killing us. Too many eyes. Too much pretending." He turns his water glass slowly. "In a city, we're monsters. In Blackwood Ridge, a lion is a neighbor who fixes the library roof. Small towns have a memory. They protect what's theirs, even when they aren't aware of what they're protecting. Amelia's signed permits for safe houses she thinks are hunting cabins. The whole town's been guarding us for years without knowing it, because we showed up and stayed and gave a damn."

"That's either very moving or excellent PR," I say, but there's no bite in it.

"Both." He smiles. "You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true about you. It's infuriating." I set the bread down. "My family valued exactly one thing growing up. Honesty. My dad used to say a lie is just a debt you take out against the future, and the interest always comes due. I built my whole career on that. Follow the money, tell the truth, let the chips land." I look down. "And I almost handed a nine-year-old to a lab because I was so sure I couldn't be wrong."

"You didn't."

"I would've."

"But you didn't." He says it with a weight that makes me hold his gaze. "You saw the house. You changed. Most people can't. Most people would rather be consistent than correct." "I've led this pride for ten years, Sophie. I've met kings and senators and men who'd sell their own mothers for a tax break. I've not once met someone who'd tear down what she built with her own hands because the truth turned out to be bigger than her findings. That's rarer than what I turn into."

The kitchen is silent, the old house settles around us. I should say something sharp to break it, but the words don't come, and his don't either, and we sit there with the space between us gone thin and neither willing to be the one who names it.

"We should find your traitor," I say finally.

"Yes," he agrees, not moving. "We should."

8

LUCIAN

For ten years I've made sure no one at Ashcroft Holdings could tell where I actually keep my secrets, and this morning I'm walking Sophie straight into the room where I keep them.

It's a decision I made at three in the morning, staring at her wall of string. Everything she's found lives in memory and paper. If I want her to go further, and I do, God help me, I want it more than I want to protect myself, she needs the real records. The originals. The generations of ledgers my family has never let a human eye touch.

Hector meets us at the vault door, arms crossed, and his jaw set in the expression he saves for arguments he's already lost.

"You're certain," he says. Not a question. A last exit, offered out of loyalty.

"I'm certain."

"She finishes her federal case, those files are the case. You're handing prosecution its evidence."

"She's not finishing that case." I key the first lock. "She changed her mind at that safe house. You weren't there. I was."

"People change their minds back."

"Not this one." I glance at Sophie, who's pretending not to listen while cataloging every inch of the corridor. "She's got a wall upstairs that already knows more than you do, Hector. The question isn't whether she can hurt us. It's whether we'd rather she work with the whole truth or half of it. Half-truths are what got us surveilled for two years."

He doesn't like it, but he steps aside anyway, because underneath the caution he's the most loyal creature I've ever known, and that means following me into a mistake if that's where I'm going. Sophie hears the exchange and says nothing, but as we pass him she stops.

"He's right to fight you on this," she tells me. Then, to Hector: "For what it's worth, if I were guarding him, I'd have fought harder. You should double the vetting on anyone with vault access. That's where your leak lives."

Hector blinks. Something in his stance loosens by a degree.

"She's not wrong," he says to me, grudgingly, and I understand that Sophie just did in ten seconds what I've failed to do in a decade, she got Hector Holloway to concede a point.

Inside, she goes quiet in the reverent way of a specialist meeting the real thing. The ledgers go back to hand-inked columns, my great-great-grandfather's script, a fortune built and hidden before we were an idea. Sophie pulls a pair of cotton gloves from her jacket like she carries them everywhere, and handles the oldest volume as though it might break.

"You kept everything," she says. "That's insane. Every operation ever run, documented, in one room."

"It's how we audit ourselves. A network this size can't run on trust alone." I pull the chair out for her. "Nine generations of Ashcrofts have sat where you're sitting, checking the last generation's math."

"And nobody ever checked it against your own courier's outbound." She's already opening a volume, already gone into numbers. "You audited the loop. You never audited the leak. You trusted the perimeter because you built it."