Page 20 of Mane in Finance

The phone vibrates again, and a new line appears beneath the others.

External transfer initiated.

Sophie goes completely still.

"He knows," she says.

I look toward the dark shape of town below us.

"Then we've run out of time."

17

SOPHIE

The transfer bar is still crawling when I drop into the terrace chair, and Lucian goes silent like he does right before something breaks.

"Talk to me." His voice is very even. "What are you doing?"

"Watching. If I kill his access to stop the transfer, he runs." My hands are already ahead of my mouth. "So I let it run. Every file he pulls tells me what he's taking and which credential's taking it. He thinks he's hidden. He just turned a lamp on for me."

"Sophie…"

"Eighty seconds. Give me eighty seconds."

I get it in seventy. The screen throws up the authentication string, and I lean in until my nose is almost on the glass, and my stomach knots.

"It's not the office login." I hear my own voice flatten. "There's a biometric on this transfer. A thumbprint, one thumb." I pull the badge record up beside it and set them side by side so he can see them touch. "Same person badged onto the executive floor at eleven thirty-six. Alone. The thumb on this drive and the body are the same, Lucian. Look."

I watch his eyes move between the two lines.

"Say his name," I tell him quietly. "I need you to hear yourself say it, or you'll spend a week pretending the screen means something else."

His jaw works. "Clifford."

"Clifford." I don't soften it, because softening it would insult us both. "Not a suite, not an assistant working late. His thumb, his badge, and his hand on the keyboard at midnight, moving the one file that could get every family we protect killed. He just handed the proof to me because he panicked."

Lucian doesn't answer. He reaches past me and leans against the terrace rail. His knuckles go pale against the iron as he squeezes, and he stares down at the town lights until I hear him sigh.

"He carried my father out of the church," he says. To the town, not to me. "Front left corner of the casket. I picked him for it."

I put my hand flat between his shoulder blades and leave it there. I don't tell him it's fine, because really, it isn't.

We're on the road before the sky changes, and I let the silence sit the whole way down the mountain, because there's nothing I can put in it that would help.

The city is gray, and when the elevator opens I already know the transfer finished at 12:31 and Clifford won't linger. The corner office is dark. I step in ahead of Lucian and stop.

The credenza has clean rectangles in the dust where photo frames stood yesterday. The desktop tower is gone, a bright unplugged cable coiled where it sat. In the corner a shredder sits jammed to the mouth with confetti, and when I lay two fingers against its housing the plastic is still faintly warm. A framed print is open from the wall, and a small safe hangs on its hinge, empty to the back plate.

"Feel this." I take Lucian's hand and press his palm to the shredder casing. "Still warm." I nod at the bare safe, the coiled cable, the pale squares on the credenza. "The photos are gone. The drive's gone. Whatever's in that shredder he didn't want found even in pieces. This isn't a man who bolted in a sweat. He walked out of here calm, with a bag he's kept packed for years."

Lucian heads to the desk, picks up a coffee mug still sitting on its coaster, turns it in his hand, sets it down again exactly where it was.

"Twenty-five years," he says. "He drank out of this yesterday afternoon. I was in this office. I asked about his granddaughter's recital."

"I know." I check the network jack, and it tells me the last thing I need. "Lucian. Turn around, because this is the one you'll want to swallow alone, but I'm not letting you."

He turns.