"They'll escalate," he says.
That's the whole briefing.
I take the stairs back to my office. The routing number is still on the first monitor, patient, waiting for me to find what's underneath it. I trace it again. Same terminal point: an account flagged in the Zayas dossier, one that shouldn't be receiving money from inside La Sirena's operating accounts.
Someone with access to these systems is funding the people trying to dismantle everything Jorge built.
I sit down and go back to work.
By early afternoon I've lost count of how many times I've read the same column.
My focus slides. I drag it back. It slides again.
The work is still here, the access logs, the timestamps, the betrayal itself, but my mind keeps finding the gaps between the numbers and filling them with something else entirely.
The way she walked through the bar. Unhurried. That systematic scan of the room that gave nothing back. Her eyes finding mine and staying there. She wasn't nervous. She was taking stock.
I drag my attention back to the screen. Review the timestamp. Eleven forty-eight PM. Someone accessed the offshore routing from an internal terminal on a Tuesday night when the club was closed and half the staff had gone home. A seven-minute window. Long enough to pull account structures. Long enough to photograph them. Whoever it is, they're not working from memory.
I open the accountant's file. Employment history, access credentials, a headshot from the onboarding paperwork.
My mind substitutes without asking permission. The wrong face entirely, completely wrong, and yet there she is instead: gray eyes, the flush climbing her throat, that smile she had no business wearing while she was terrified. My chest tightens, one involuntary second of it, before I catch the reaction and make myself look at the actual photograph until it resolves back intothe correct face. The real face. The one that matters for the work I'm supposed to be doing.
My primal brain doesn't interrupt at convenient moments. It waits until I'm trying to catch a traitor and then surfaces with a completely irrelevant image of a woman I've met exactly twice. Repeatedly. Without embarrassment, with no apparent plan to stop.
I have processes for this. Discipline, built over years, specifically designed to prevent this kind of interference.
The processes are not working.
I go back to the timestamp. Seven minutes. Internal terminal. Three people on-site that Tuesday. Two have alibis I can verify.
The third doesn't.
I add the name to my list and drag my attention forward by main force, and it holds for approximately four minutes before the slide begins again.
Her pace quickening on the dark sidewalk. Head turning to search the shadows. The intensity of that fear when it arrived — real, sudden, alive in her face.
She wanted it to be real.
She needed it to be.
I stay with that for a moment. The relief on her face when she looked up at her motel door and found me there, underneath the fear, completely undisguised. Like confirmation. Like something she'd been waiting all evening to know for certain.
I've never had that before. Someone who looked at the monster and felt relief.
I add two more names to my elimination list, and I don't look at the accountant's photograph again.
The traps are set by three o'clock. The mole hunt is as far along as it can go until the Zayas act on something and tell me which bait they took.
I open a new window.
I'm vetting her. That's the framing I start with. She knows my name, my face, the building where we met. She could be anyone, could tell anyone. Any reasonable man in my position would want to know more about what he's dealing with before this continues.
Wren Ayton. Twenty-seven.
What comes back is a ghost's file.
A string of cities, each one with a short-term lease or a sublet, and then nothing, a gap, and then another city. New York before Miami. Portland before that. Seattle. Chicago. Philadelphia. Years of movement without a destination, each place as temporary as the one before it. No emergency contacts listed anywhere. No social presence I can find. Temp job records, waitressing, front-of-house theater work, work that leaves no mark.
