“Excuses,” Sidarov said, almost gently. “You had every tool. You failed. And now, because of your failure, we have had to expend extra...effort. Extra risk. Extra attention. All because you could not do something as simple as stay ahead of one careful girl with a calculator.”
Norah flinched. Her fingers dug into the silk at her hip to keep from shaking.
Trip lurched forward a step, only stopped by the bruising hand on his arm. “Please. I can fix it. I can re-layer the shells,shift to a new vendor, move the portfolios. Give me two weeks—no, one?—”
“And who will you blame when you fail again?” Sidarov asked, studying her nails. “Her? Richard? The Senator? The market?” She lifted her gaze, and this time there was no amusement in it. Only fatigue. And something cold enough to burn. “I do not enjoy incompetence, Mr. Harrington. But I enjoy loose ends even less.”
Norah’s brain tripped over the phrase. Loose ends?
Her heart lurched into her throat. “Wait,” she said, before she could stop herself. “He—he didn’t?—”
Three things happened at once.
Hale’s hand closed hard over her wrist.
Morris’s eyes snapped to her, warning flaring like a silent alarm.
And one of the suited men stepped cleanly into her line of sight.
The next sound was very small. A muffled pop, more like a door closing down the hall than anything cinematic. For a split second, Norah’s mind refused to interpret it.
Then Trip’s body jerked.
A dark bloom spread across the front of his immaculate shirt, stark against the white. His knees buckled. The man who had fired the gun stayed steady, his arm extended and his face impassive.
Harrington hit the floor. Norah’s stomach pitched as the room tilted.
She’d never seen a man die before.
She’d seen news reports. Accident footage. Cold case files in tidy PDFs. Numbers in casualty columns. She’d said the wordsstatistical impactabout events that had ruined lives.
But this was a human body crumpling two strides away from her shoes. This was a strangled, wet sound that might’ve beena breath. Might’ve been his last attempt at one. This was blood soaking into the tasteful carpet of a luxury hotel while hundreds of elites danced and sipped champagne a hundred feet away.
Her hand flew to her mouth. The perfume and lemon polish and champagne all soured into something she could taste at the back of her throat.
Hale’s grip tightened, but he didn’t flinch.
Senator Morris didn’t scream or recoil at all. She merely exhaled slowly, as if Trip had been an unpleasant agenda item finally crossed off the list.
“Unfortunate,” Morris said. “He was quite talented. Up to a point.”
“Talent is nothing without reliability,” Sidarov replied.
She stepped closer to the body with the bored disinterest of someone inspecting a spilled drink. Then she turned to Hale.
“Congratulations,” she said. “It appears you have just been promoted. I find myself in need of a new financial manager.”
Hale inclined his head, expression sober. “I’ll do what’s necessary.”
Norah’s ears rang.
She looked between Hale and the cooling shape on the floor. The air felt too thin. Or too thick. Her vision tunneled at the edges.
She had found the anomalies in the NorthBridge files. She had pushed and worked around the data blocks. She had made noise within Summit and brought in Black Tower and called the SEC.
Now Trip Harrington was dead. Because she’d done her job well.
Guilt slammed into her, sharp and irrational and total. It didn’t matter that Trip had been laundering money for a criminal network. It didn’t matter that he’d chosen this. She couldn’t get past the chain.
