“I will review this in full,” he said. “It will take time.”
“How much time?”
“Six weeks.”
“That is too long.”
“It is the time it requires.” He looked at her with the flat, patient expression that meant a negotiation was over. “You are welcome to dispute this. You are welcome to leave. You are, however, not well-advised to do the second.”
Rona stopped moving. “Why not?”
Lachlan looked at me. I looked at him. The communication between us was fluent and economical, built on the months of shared decision-making that had turned us into operational partners. I could read the permission in his expression. He could read the intention in mine.
“Mackie’s men have been watching your flat in Glasgow,” I said. “Since the moment your name appeared in the Ledger. Did you know?”
Rona’s face changed. The professional composure held but the calculation behind it shifted – a woman who had entered a room with one set of variables and was now operating with a different set entirely.
“How long?” she said.
“Three weeks.”
She looked at the door. She looked at the hall. She looked at Crag Manor’s stone walls and cold flagstones and the coal fire burning low in the grate and the salt air coming through the gap under the front door. I watched the calculation happen. I had done similar calculations myself – the rapid assessment of options, the weighing of bad against worse, the moment when you realise that the safest place is not the place you would have chosen.
“How certain are you?” she said.
“Ewan’s network confirmed it yesterday,” I said. “Two men. Rotating shifts. Parked on your street and across from your office building.”
She absorbed this. Her jaw did the tightening thing again – the micro-movement that was the only visible crack in her composure.
“I would like a room,” she said. “With a lock.”
She shook Lachlan’s hand before she went upstairs. It was the handshake of someone who knew exactly what her hand was worth.
I watched her go up the staircase. Her back was straight. Her briefcase was in her right hand. She moved with the efficient,contained stride of a person who had been managing hostile rooms long before this one.
The coal fire cracked behind me. The entrance hall smelled of woodsmoke and Rona’s perfume and the salt air that had followed her through the front door. The combination was strange. Expensive fragrance and ancient stone. Professional precision and wild coastline. She did not belong here. But she had arrived with the posture of a woman who would make the space accommodate her, rather than the other way round.
Niamh appeared from the kitchen doorway with a fresh piece of toast.
“Well,” she said. “That was fun.”
I looked at her.
“She’s going to be trouble,” Niamh said, not unhappily. She took a bite of her toast and went back to the kitchen.
I stood in the entrance hall alone. The coal fire crackled. The wind off the Clyde rattled the leaded windows. Upstairs, a woman I did not yet understand was settling into a room with a lock on the door and a briefcase full of evidence and a contained fury I could feel through the floorboards – the fury of someone who had been used by one powerful man and was determined not to be used by another.
My first instinct was to dislike her. My second instinct – arriving immediately, stepping on the heels of the first – was that I recognised her. That quality. That drawn line. That decision, already made, about what she would and would not give.
I had made the same decision, standing in a different hallway, months ago. I had made it barefoot then too.
That evening, in the room with the lock, Rona Caine sat on the bed and opened a second briefcase she had not shown anyone.
Inside: a full breakdown of the Clyde Syndicate’s financial structure, annotated by hand. Eight months of work. Source documents, cross-references, corporate traces. She had mapped the Syndicate’s legitimate cover operations, its dock logistics, its casino revenue streams, and the precise points where the Shadow Union’s infrastructure intersected with Mackie’s expanding network.
Eight months. She had started this file two months after McInnis froze her accounts. While she was living on credit and sleeping in her office and rebuilding her professional life from the scorched ground McInnis had left, she had been building this. Methodically. Patiently. With the cold, sustained focus of a woman who understood that the only response to being destroyed was to become the one who knew where the evidence was.
She had been building this file since before the gold card arrived. Since before her name was written in the Ledger. Since before the Winter Wager.
