Barnaby lowered his chip. The Cajun seasoning was suddenly very present on his tongue.
“It sounds like this is from someone who knew what Brookridge needed,” James continued, examining a fry with scholarly interest, “and had an idea about what it would cost. Down to the figure that you’ve been holding in your head for years. That suggests familiarity with the centre’s operations.Intimatefamiliarity.”
“James.”
“Mm?”
“Are you really interrogating me about this anonymous donation?”
“I’m asking you questions. There’s a distinction, although I grant you it’s a fine one when the person asking happens to be your head of state.” James ate the chip. “Whoever made this gift knew enough about Brookridge to calculate the precise amount required for the improvements you’ve just described, and two years of operational costs. That’s a figure that you’ve only ever told me, and Vidal, because you think your father will consider your goals too unrealistic.”
The silence that followed was occupied by Vidal sniffing loudly into a napkin and James regarding Barnaby over the top of his vanilla milkshake with a neutral expression.
“Furthermore,” James said, and Barnaby’s stomach sank, because James deployingfurthermoremeant the cross-examination was entering its second phase. The push. “Anonymous charitable giving of this magnitude has specific tax implications. If the donor is a UK-resident, they’d claim Gift Aid, which would leave a paper trail. If they’re non-domiciled but UK-earning, the structure gets more complex. And if they happen to be, say, a professional athlete with substantial fight purses held in a management company — hypothetically only — the tax-efficient route would be a direct transfer from the company rather than a personal account, which would show up as a corporate gift rather than an individual one.” He paused.“Did Greg mention whether the transfer came from a personal account or a corporate entity?”
Barnaby stared at him. “I didn’t ask.”
“You might want to.”
Vidal had given up all pretence of composure. He was clutching the napkin against his mouth with both hands, his eyes streaming, his shoulders shaking with the effort of containing what was clearly a full emotional detonation. When Barnaby looked at him, Vidal shook his head violently and made a strangled noise.
“This is not about Lex,” Barnaby said.
James said nothing. He sipped his milkshake and let his silence do all the work for him.
“It’s not,” Barnaby repeated uncertainly. “Anyonecould have…there are hundreds of donors who could have done it! The centre has a public profile, James. We’ve been featured on BBC South East. People give anonymously all the time.”
“People give five hundred pounds anonymously. People do not give four million, three hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds anonymously unless they have a specific reason to ensure the recipient cannot refuse, cannot return the money, and cannot pick afightabout it.” James set the milkshake down. “Which rather narrows the field to someone who knows you well enough to anticipate that your first instinct, upon learning who’d given it, would be to hand it back on principle.”
The room was very quiet. Vidal had buried his face in the sofa cushion, his shoulders heaving.
Barnaby looked at the Five Guys bag on the table. The grease spots had spread further, dark and definitive against the brown paper. His hands were in his lap, his fingers laced together, gripping hard enough to whiten his knuckles.
“I ended things with him,” he said. “He has no reason to do this for me.”
James leaned forward. His elbows settled on his knees, and his reading glasses slid from his hair onto the bridge of his nose, which undermined the gravity of his posture in a way that Barnaby would have found funny under any other circumstances. “Bash.” His voice was gentle. “This is what love looks like when you won’t let it reach you any other way.”
“You need to take this, Bash. Own it,” Vidal said, lifting his face from the cushion. “Don’t let this be a goodbye.”
Take the win, Barns.Lex’s voice, rough and warm, sounded in Barnaby’s head as clearly as though Lex were sitting right next to him.You take what the world offers while you still can.
Barnaby looked down at his hands and forced them to loosen finger by finger, until his palms fell open in his lap. “I need to think…” James and Vidal said nothing, which was how Barnaby knew that they understood exactly how much the ground had just shifted under him.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Thefirst punch Morozov threw was a jab that Lex saw coming from the moment the Russian’s left shoulder dropped, a full half-second of telegraph that would have embarrassed a journeyman. Lex slipped it clean, rolling his head right while the glove parted the air where his temple had been. The crowd roared. Sixteen thousand people in the MGM Grand Garden Arena, and every one of them wanted blood.
Lex gave them a jab of his own. Quick and precise, snapping Morozov’s head back a fraction before the Russian reset. The reach disadvantage was real: a full four inches of arm that Morozov could use to keep Lex at range, working behind a long jab that pistoned out at awkward intervals. Morozov threw combinations in threes, always finishing with the right hand, and the right hand was the one that could put you on the canvas if you couldn’t dodge it.
He worked inside through the first round, cutting the distance with lateral movement, making Morozov turn. The ring felt small at this level. Eighteen feet across and it shrank withevery exchange, the ropes pressing in at the periphery of his vision until the whole world contracted to Morozov’s chin and the shifting geometry between their bodies. Malik’s voice came from the corner in clipped bursts:
“Hands up!”
“Work the body!”
“Make him miss!”
Lex kept his chin tucked behind his left shoulder, moving the way his body had been trained to since he was fourteen years old and throwing punches at a heavy bag in a Barking gym.
