“Come on, you beautiful bitch,” I mutter, clicking through columns. Donations in. Expenses out. A few line items don’t belong.
The cursor blinks like it knows something I don’t.
French pokes her head in without knocking, her short dark hair a halo of static. “You talking dirty to the books again, Rebel?”
“Numbers are the only thing that listen,” I say, not looking up.
She grins. “That’s ‘cause they can’t talk back, unlike Divine.”
As if summoned, Divine’s voice carries from the hallway. “I heard that, heel-queen!”
French snorts and vanishes before the tech goddess can retaliate. The banter should loosen me up, but itdoesn’t. My pulse keeps ticking faster with each mismatched total.
“Thirty grand,” French says, dropping the duffel onto my desk with a thud. She flips her long hair back, her eyes narrowing. “Private rooms from last night.”
“Should’ve been forty,” I say without looking up, already uncapping my pen.
French arches a brow. “Or maybe you’re running your math sideways again.”
I flash her a grin. “Sideways keeps us paid.”
She doesn’t bother answering, just rolls her eyes and sits across from me. That’s French. Businesslike to the core, cold enough to cut a man’s ego in half, yet steady. She’s the only one who can keep pace with me on the books. Where I bend the rules until they scream, she straightens them just enough that the numbers still pass if anyone takes a closer look.
I start counting, fast and methodical, my hands moving by memory more than by sight. Alex taught me that trick when we were teenagers hustling pool halls for pocket money. He’d laugh every time I caught a cheater skimming the pot, swearing I had X-ray eyes.
“You’ve got to feel the weight,” he’d said, stacking bills into my palm. “Cash tells you when it’s short, V. People lie. Numbers don’t.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“Thirty even,” I say, stacking the bills into neat piles. “Every one of these bastards reeks of cheap whiskey and cheaper regrets.”
French snorts, then fires up the laptop. “Good thing regrets look so good in a ledger.”
Together, we start funneling the cash through our fronts. The tattoo shop, the bar’s receipts, fight-night bets, and even the women’s shelter donations. On paper, the money’s clean. In reality? Dirty as sin. Exactly the way I like it.
Give me a dollar, and I can make it wear a thousand different faces before it hits the bank. That’s my gift. That’s why they trust me with the purse strings.
But as I log the totals, a small gap catches my eye. Too small for French to notice. Too small for anyone but me to see.
“Something’s off,” I say quietly, tapping the column.
She leans over my shoulder, scanning the screen. “Could be a mistake.”
“Not in my books.” I zoom in, scrolling through the vendor list, tracing the outgoing transactions. A new vendor name sits where it shouldn’t. Plain, boring, forgettable.
Silver Talon Janitorial LLC.
My stomach tightens. “Something’s coming through a janitorial vendor account. Silver Talon LLC.”
French frowns. “Never heard of it.”
“Exactly.”
She tilts her head. “Could be a sub-contract from the bar?”
“Could be someone cleaning more than floors.” I jot a note in the margin, a single star. One anomaly becomes two,then three, each smaller than dust yet still enough to make my instincts itch.
French sighs, closing the laptop. “You push too hard, Rebel. You bend shit until it’s one breath from snapping. One of these days, it’s gonna snap back.”
