Page 16 of Mane in Finance

"She's down here," one says, low. "Records office. No back door."

They're not wrong about the back door. But I've memorized safe-house floor plans that Lucian showed me, and one thing stuck, the old buildings in this town almost always have a coal chute or a service hatch, because they were heated by furnace when they were built.

I search for it as silently as I can, finding it by the far wall, half-hidden behind shelving, a low iron door that hasn't opened in decades. It shrieks when I haul it, so much for quiet.

"There!"

I go through the gap on my hands and knees, into a dark crawl that smells of a hundred years of soot, and a hand closes on my ankle. I kick hard, with the boot I'm grateful I wore, and feel it connect, and the grip breaks, and I scramble up a coal ramp toward a square of gray daylight.

I come up into the alley behind Third Street filthy and gasping, and I don't run for Main. Instead, I head for the tree line.

The first man clears the chute faster than I expected. These guys move different, too smooth, too fast, and I put it together even as I'm running. The syndicate learned I'm still alive, and they've stopped sending contractors and started sending their own.

He catches me just before I reach the treeline. I don't waste breath screaming, I turn into him instead of away, because a moving target that suddenly stops fouls the timing of someone bigger, and I drive the heel of my hand up under his chin the way I paid a self-defense instructor in the city to teach me and never once expected to use. It rocks him, but doesn't drop him. It buys the half-second I need, and it's enough, because a golden blur comes over the chain-link fence behind him and simply removes him from the equation.

Lucian doesn't fully shift. He doesn't have to. He's caught the man mid-motion with a strength no suit can hide, and when the second one clears the alley, Hector's there too, and it's over in the time it takes me to get my breath back.

Lucian rounds on me, and his eyes are still that lion-bright. "Sophie, are you okay?"

"I'm fine. Like honestly, I'm fine." I'm shaking and grinning, which is a terrible combination, adrenaline making an idiot of me. "Also I got the ledger. And I broke one of their noses before you showed up, so before you start…"

"Before I start." He catches my face in both hands, checking me over for damage with a thoroughness that isn't about triage. "You turned into the attacker. Who taught you that?"

"A very expensive man in a strip-mall dojo. Worth every penny." My hands find his forearms, and I feel how hard he's gripping, how scared under the fury. "Lucian. I'm fine. We're a good team. You showed up, I'd already bought the time. That's what partners do."

Hector, checking the downed men, snorts. "She's not wrong, Luke."

Lucian exhales, and the lion goes out of his eyes. "Two names," he says finally. "Your window narrows it to two. And now they're desperate enough to send their own." He takes the ledger from me like it's made of glass.

Back in the vault an hour later, scrubbed clean and still buzzing, I lay the paper ledger beside the digital record and prove the theory.

They don't match. The 2011 physical entry shows a Cedar Bend transfer of one figure. The scrubbed digital version shows another. The gap is exactly the size of a diversion the forger smoothed away. Paper doesn't lie, and this paper has just called the digital record a liar to its face.

"That's it," I say to Lucian, tapping both columns. "That's the thing no one can talk their way out of. Someone altered the digitals after the fact and assumed the paper was long gone. It wasn't. Their thoroughness just hanged them."

"So who?" He's leaning over my shoulder, and Hector's come in behind us, arms crossed against the doorframe.

I pull up the list I've been building for a week and start cutting. It's the part of my job that satisfies me right up until it sickens me, the moment abstraction becomes people.

"Start with the four who had vault-level access years ago. That's Marchetti, Osei, Talbot in operations, and the CFO's office." I draw a line. "Now apply the batch window. To alter the books in those dead minutes, you had to still be around, routinely, with nobody questioning it. Marchetti works remote three days a week and always has, her late nights would've flagged someone. She's out." I cross her off, and I feel Lucian's relief land, the funeral-carrying friend cleared. "Osei transferred to the West Coast office in 2015. The scrubs kept happening on Eastern time after he left. He physically couldn't. Out."

"That leaves two," Hector says.

"Yes." I circle them. "Talbot in operations. And the CFO's office, which isn't one person, it's a suite, the CFO plus whoever he trusts with his credentials. Both had the access. Both were around every night for years. Both survived every reorg with their hands on the books. I can't split them yet. But I've gone from your whole company to two chairs, Lucian. Two. Give me a few more days and the paper will tell me which one."

Lucian stares at the two circled names, and I see him understand that one of them betrayed his father under his own roof.

"A few more days," he says quietly. "Then we have him."

"Yes," I agree. "Try to sleep. You're no good to me exhausted, and I'm going to need you sharp when this ends."

14

LUCIAN

Two names sit on Sophie's whiteboard, black and clear, one is my culprit, the other is a victim. This morning I'm doing the quietest, ugliest work of my life, investigating both of them without letting either feel my eyes.

I do it through proxies and paper, just like she taught me. I request Talbot's operational travel records under cover of a routine security review Hector invents wholesale. I pull the CFO's office calendar under the pretext of scheduling a year-end audit that doesn't exist. Every query must look normal, because whoever betrayed the pride has survived thirteen years and will smell a hunt the instant it turns toward him. I've run this company on directness, learning to move sideways against my own people leaves a taste in my mouth I can't rinse out. Sophie finds me at noon staring at two files I've read about four times each.