Page 12 of Mane in Finance

The room absorbs that. These are men who've buried people, and they've earned the right to sit with this terrible revelation before I ask them to be useful again.

Sophie doesn't let them sit long. That's her gift and her ruthlessness both.

"I'm sorry about the boy," she says, and she means it, but she keeps going. "I'm telling you the geometry so you'll believe the next part, because the next is the reason I dragged three Alphas out of bed. This network isn't regional. I pulled the trucking firm's full filings. Their corridors run coast to coast. The refrigerated-unit company has depots in eleven states. Whatever this is, Blackwood Ridge isn't its target. We're one stop on a national route." She looks around to each of them. "You've each been fighting your own corner, thinking you had a local predator. You have a continental one. And it's been using Lucian's own money to build the roads."

Kian turns to me. "You knew your network was compromised?"

"I knew someone was watching. Sophie proved they've been stealing for eleven years and shipping for at least four." I hold his gaze, because he deserves that. "I brought a human forensic accountant into the vault, Kian. I showed her the records. Before you say it, yes, I know what that breaks. I did it anyway, and if I hadn't, we'd still be blaming the mountains."

Kian is quiet, weighing it the careful way he weighs everything. Then he gives a single nod. "Then she's earned the room. I won't pretend I'm comfortable. But comfortable people don't win wars."

The strategy runs three hours, and in the middle of it Sophie stops being the outsider I vouched for and becomes the person the meeting orbits.

It happens without anyone announcing it. Kurtis asks how we could possibly predict the next shipment, and instead of deferring to me, he asks her directly. She answers in load schedules and fuel logs and the ninety-minute windows when a refrigerated unit has to be plugged in or its cargo spoils, and every shifter leans in, because she's just handed them something their claws never could. A way to be waiting.

"Refrigerated transport can't sit indefinitely," she says, pulling up a depot map. "It's a leash. Wherever they're moving people, they're chained to power and to schedule. Freight this size files intent with weigh stations. If Hector can get me live access to the weigh-station data, and I suspect he can, I can flag a matching load before it reaches our region. Not after. Before."

"You want to ambush a truck on a public highway," Kian says.

"I'd rather meet one on a service road of our choosing, at a time we're ready for, with the three of you and whatever you bring." She folds her arms. "I don't fight. I have no illusions about that. I tell you which truck, and when, and which door the cargo's behind. You're the ones who open it. That's the division, and it only works if you trust me."

Kurtis looks at me, and a slow grin cuts through his beard. "Luke. Where'd you find her."

"She found me," I say. "She was building a case to put me in a federal prison."

"Course she was." Kurtis laughs, big and rumbling, the first warm sound in the room all morning. "Best kind. Means she can't be bought."

They leave near noon with assignments and a shared frequency, and I feel something other than dread, the specific relief of a burden finally set down on more than one back.

I walk Sophie out to the terrace after. The valley's laid out gold and small below us, the town she nearly exposed going about its unknowing morning.

"You commanded that room," I admit. "Two Alphas and a bear who's older than your career, and they were asking you the questions."

"I gave them a lever. People follow whoever hands them that." She shrugs, but there's color high on her face. "It's not magic. It's just being the one who did the reading."

"It's more than that." I watch her staring out to town, and I let myself think the thought I've been circling for days without permitting it to land. I've imagined the future as a series of threats to be managed. Standing here, I imagine it differently. I imagine her at that whiteboard a year from now, five years. I even imagine not carrying the next crisis alone.

"You're staring, Ashcroft," she says, not turning.

"I'm strategizing."

"Liar." But she's smiling when she says it, and we stay close without another word.

11

SOPHIE

Hector's weigh-station data gives me a truck, and that gives me a town four hours north, so by afternoon Lucian and I are on a two-lane highway pretending to be a couple who buy antiques.

A refrigerated hauler with a flagged manifest is scheduled to overnight at a depot outside a place called Ferristown, and I want eyes on the depot's front operation, a farm-equipment distributor that, on paper, has no reason to lease three reinforced units a month. Kian's people shadow the actual truck. Kurtis has a crew staged an hour back. Lucian and I are the soft approach, the two faces that can walk into a diner and a hardware store without anyone reaching for a phone. He drives, and I navigate complaining.

"You could put some music on," I tell him. "I won't tell the pride you have feelings."

"I'm listening to the road."

"The road is not saying anything."

"It's telling me we've been behind the same gray sedan since the county line." He says it mildly, eyes forward. "Two cars back now. It let one pass to keep the gap even. That's not how people drive when they're going somewhere. That's how they drive when they're going where you're going."