Page 14

It’s nine o’clock at night. My office is dark except for the desk lamp, and I’m standing at the window listening to the elevator climb thirty-nine floors.

My wolf has been counting the seconds since I sent that text.

Two weeks. Fourteen days since she started working in this building, and I’ve cataloged every interaction like evidence. The way she turns her head when she’s listening, a slight tilt to the left that exposes the line of her neck. How she taps her pen against her lower lip when she’s reading something that doesn’t add up.

I know her patterns. When she eats. When she sleeps. When she lies awake in her apartment at two in the morning with her heartbeat running fast and her scent shifting to something heated and restless that makes my wolf claw at the inside of my ribs.

She thinks about me at night. I know this with a certainty that would horrify her. The bond carries her arousal to me, faint but unmistakable, and when I catch it I have to breathe through my teeth until the urge to go to her passes.

It doesn’t pass. It recedes. It never passes.

My phone lights up once. Roman.

Kowalski wants a sit-down. Says DeSanto approached him.

I read it twice. Kowalski controls two clubs in River North and three bookmaking operations no one has managed to prove exist. He has paid the Voronovs for protection for nineteen years. If DeSanto is approaching him, the Cicero problem is spreading.

Tomorrow, I type.

Roman replies immediately: Tonight would be smarter

I turn my phone facedown.

The elevator opens. I hear her footsteps in the hallway. Her heels on the marble, the rhythm of her stride. She walks like she’s going somewhere she’s chosen to go, not somewhere she’s been summoned. I don’t know if that’s courage or defiance. Probably both.

She knocks. I say come in. The door opens.

She’s changed her shirt since this afternoon. This one is dark blue, silk or something like it, and it catches the light from the desk lamp in a way that makes the fabric look liquid against her skin. Her hair is down. All day at work she wears it pulled back, controlled, professional. Right now it falls past her shoulders and the scent of her shampoo hits me before she’s fully through the door.

My wolf goes silent. The predatory stillness of an animal that has located its prey and is deciding whether to move.

“Sit down,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I feel.

She takes the chair across from my desk. The same chair she sat in the first day. I watch her settle into it, watch how she crosses her legs, how her hands find the armrests. She’s not nervous. She’s alert, the same way she always is around me, her body tuned to a frequency she doesn’t recognize.

I sit across from her in the chair next to hers, close enough to see the faint pulse at the base of her throat. I probably shouldn’t have done that. The desk is a barrier, a professional boundary, a piece of furniture that says this is business. Sitting next to her says something else.

“Your father’s financial records,” I start. “I’ve been tracing the transfer we discussed. The money moved through several intermediary accounts before the trail disappeared.”

This is true. I’ve been over Marco’s records a dozen times. The transfer was initiated under his oversight, moved exactly the way it was supposed to move through the first stages of the routing, and then stopped. Somewhere between one account and the next, the trail goes cold.

“And you still think my father took it?”

“I think your father knew where it was going.”

She’s quiet for a moment. I watch her think. The slight narrowing of her eyes, the way her gaze moves to a middle distance where numbers live.

“My father was careful with money,” she says. “If he moved money, he wasn’t skimming. He was doing something else.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know yet.”

She looks at me when she says it, and her eyes are dark and steady and she’s not lying but she’s not telling me everything either. She knows more than she’s sharing. I can smell it, the faint chemical edge of concealment, the subtle change in her scent that tells me she’s choosing her words with care.

I should press. I should lean forward and ask her what she found in her father’s apartment, what she’s been doing every night alone in that apartment with her door locked and her light on past midnight.

Instead I hand her a folder. “These are the account records. Take them home. See if anything jumps out.”