Page 7
“Exactly the question to ask.”
I shook my head. “That wasn’t an answer.”
“It was the answer.” He leaned back in his chair. “Most people take the background check at face value. They see legitimacy and stop looking. We don’t. We play poker,” he said. “Everyone has a tell. So does a file. The résumé isn’t the lie.”
“The placement is.”
His mouth curved. “Now you’re awake.”
“Don’t push it.”
Nik tapped the hiring record on the screen. “She joined the City a few weeks after I settled in Manhattan permanently. A few weeks after Hayes and Delgado realized I wasn’t going to stay in my lane. I doubt that’s a coincidence.”
I let out a low hum. “Amazing how many people are keeping their eyes on you.”
Nik didn’t blink. “No shit.”
I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck. “Ciro seems good at creating identities.”
Nik’s eyes lifted to mine.
“Kind of like you,” I added.
He huffed once. “No one is as good as I am.”
“There’s the humility we all admire.”
“But yes,” he said, ignoring me. “Delgado has enough money, corrupt officials, and terrified people willing to stamp whatever he puts in front of them. But this doesn’t look like a woman invented from nothing. It looks worse.”
“Worse how?”
“She’s a real woman. Real credentials. Real access.” His gaze cut back to the personnel file. “Someone placed her exactly where Delgado, Hayes, or Whitaker needed her.”
I pictured Isabella Delgado standing in Xyst with two uniforms and a smile too calm for the room she’d entered. She’d been pretty, polished, and entirely untroubled.
Maybe she was innocent.
Maybe not.
“And if she’s exactly who she says she is?” I asked.
“Then we need to find out why she chose to become useful to the wrong men.”
The printer clicked again.
Nik pulled out the fresh stack of documents, skimmed the first page, and tucked them into the same folder Isabella had shoved at me.
“Farris, the corporate trail, and everything I found on Miss Delgado.” He held it out to me. “It’s all there.”
I took it as one last page slid into the tray.
Nik pulled it free, glanced down, and smirked.
“What’s that?”
“The liquor-license suspension.”
I took it from him and frowned at the page. “This says terminated.”
