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"Adrianos."

"Fine."

She points at me. "And nobody tells me where I can and cannot go."

"They advise."

"They can advise silently."

"That's not advice."

"It's my favorite kind." She fires back, and then she's gone.

I stand in the middle of the office, listening to her footsteps fade down the hall. A minute later, I hear the investigation room door open. Not the elevator.

Of course she's gone back to work.

I walk to the doorway and watch her through the open door. She's already seated before the screens, handbag discarded beside the chair, fingers moving over the keyboard as though the last twenty minutes never happened.

As though she didn't just dismantle half my argument and force me to negotiate the other half. As though I didn't almost tell her the truth.

This should be simple.

Elena is useful. Brilliant. She sees patterns my people miss, and whoever controls OB6 has noticed. Protecting her is operational necessity. Nothing more.

That's the explanation I should be able to accept.

But operational necessity doesn't explain why I counted the seconds between her hanging up downstairs and walking into my office.

It doesn't explain why the thought of her returning to her apartment alone makes violence gather beneath my skin.

It doesn't explain why, when I woke and found the bed empty, fear reached me before reason did.

I have buried too many people.

My son, my parents, men who trusted me. People I should have protected.

I look at Elena through the doorway as she pushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear and leans closer to the screen, completely absorbed in numbers that might lead us to whoever has been dismantling our world piece by piece.

Something cold settles beneath my ribs. This isn't about protecting my forensic accountant anymore. It hasn't been for some time. And there is one thought I refuse to finish, because finishing it would give it a name.

No. Not yet.

21

Elena

By eleven thirty, I have been confined to Adrianos's penthouse for exactly one hour and seven minutes.

Technically, confined is inaccurate. We negotiated. I can leave whenever I want, provided I take a driver who is also security and another security guard whose presence Adrianos has tried to disguise as additional support.

I know what additional support looks like. It has a gun beneath its jacket.

For the moment, however, leaving would require abandoning the seventeen spreadsheets open across my screens, and I currently find financial crime more interesting than proving a point. Adrianos does not need to know this.

I take another sip of coffee and return to the destination accounts I isolated last night. Fifty-seven million dollars moved after Petros became compromised, but that number has been bothering me since I woke.

It is too neat. Not mathematically neat. Criminally neat.