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“I’ll buy the softest rug in Chicago.”

“And maybe a pillow. For next time.”

“There’s going to be a next time?”

She lifts her head and looks at me. “Dominic. There’s going to be a next time every time you look at me in front of these windows.”

I pull her closer. I press my mouth against her hair and breathe her in and think about the truth I didn’t tell her and the words I did. I love you. I said it. I meant it. And the gap between loving her and lying to her is the widest it’s ever been and it’s getting wider every day.

We get up. We shower. I cook. She sits on the counter and steals vegetables from the cutting board while she tells me about the Henderson accounts, oblivious to the fact that her restructuring has created a crisis Roman confronted me about this morning.

Halfway through explaining why four intermediary LLCs were redundant, she stops.

“Oh. I found your money.”

I stop chopping.

“What?”

She reaches for another piece of bell pepper.

“The money you said disappeared when my father died.”

My hand goes still around the knife. “Sophia.”

“It’s not gone.”

“That isn’t possible.”

Her eyebrows go up.

I reconsider my wording. “My people have been looking for it since Marco died.”

“Well, I found it.” There is absolutely no arrogance in the statement.

“Where is it?”

“A holding account attached to one of the intermediary companies Marco used. It looks inactive unless you follow the transaction history backward instead of forward.”

I set the knife down. “Why would he put it there?”

She looks at me for a long moment. “I think because he’d started finding transactions he couldn’t explain. Something about that route bothered him, and he wasn’t willing to send that much money through it until he understood why.”

Marco’s financial discrepancies.

Viktor.

Something cold settles beneath my ribs. “Can you prove it?”

“I already did.” She slides off the counter. “The documentation is on your desk. The money never left Voronov control. It was just sitting somewhere nobody thought to look.”

I stare at her. Months. My accountants have spent months tracing that money.

“So,” she says, folding her arms, “about my debt.”

“You don’t have one.”

Her mouth opens slightly.