“You forgot who the hell are you talking with, boy! Bring me that coffee before I?—”
“It’ll take us exactly twenty-one minutes to pack everything and walk out of this house. You can’t report us missing for twenty-four hours. Do you have any idea what twenty-four hours without alcohol looks like? After that, the police would have to find us. By my calculations, we could stay hidden for a week without any trouble. Can you last that long without putting that poison in your system? If you come near us again, we walk. And your supply walks with us.”
I don’t know if it was the numbers that scared him, but he never laid a hand on me again after that.
Dean squeezed my shoulder and murmured“I’m proud of you”before leaving for work.
That same stubborn knot lodges itself in my throat when I think about how he came home with pizza that evening, to celebrate what he called my Emancipation.
My mind picks the worst possible moment to conjure a pair of round glasses, and just like that, I’m furious with myself.
I should be focused on the man who killed my brother.
Forget about Amalia Sanchez, Silas.
I’m trying. I’m really fucking trying.
In the morning, I’m in the bedroom, looking out the windows that face La Condesa, the neighborhood where my city apartment sits.
Part of why I chose this location is the quiet and the green, along with the fact that it’s one of the safest and most affluent areas in the city.
A regular math professor could never afford a penthouse here. Someone who launders money for various organizations, on the other hand, can.
I figured out early enough that talent means nothing if you don’t know how to use it, and academia will never fully compensate for what I can do with numbers.
The first time I manipulated a company’s books, I was fourteen, and my brother Dean was the one who introduced me to that world.
With a father who valued his vodka bottle more than whether we had food on the table or electricity in the house, Dean had essentially been taking care of me on his own since our mother died when I was ten.
Seven years older than me, he always made sure I had clean clothes for school, pocket money for a sandwich, and the internet bill paid.
I didn’t know how he managed any of it until I was fourteen, when my talent for numbers had already become impossible to ignore, and he sat me down with a company’s financials and told me what they needed.
After three online courses covering basic accounting principles and a few hours spent reading through tax law, I managed to save that company $26,009 in taxes.
That was the moment I understood what I wanted to do, but Dean was dead set against me dropping out of school for a part-time gig like this. So he proposed a deal: one case a month, and everything else had to go toward passing my exams and getting into a top university.
“You don’t quit school, you don’t quit learning, because that’s the moment you lose yourself, Silas,”he said to me over and over again.
The memory of him puts a knot in my throat because I am responsible for his death. And no matter how deep I bury myself in equations and complex systems, I don’t have a magic eraser for the blood on my hands.
These days I only take large cases, organizations that need to make millions disappear, from which I take a twenty-two percent commission.
Enormous by any standard in this field, but the people who end up coming to me usually do so because everyone else was too afraid to get involved.
I’m not. I don’t understand what there is to be afraid of when you know every formula, every theory, and every tweak in the tax system you’re working with. But other people’s fear has been my income stream for years.
I walk into the living room and turn on the ambient lights then pull an Oberon beer from the fridge. Dean’s favorite.
I still remember how horrified he was when I told him how much I’d paid for a case, but compared to what we had growing up, it was the equivalent of a decent whisky.
I have exams to grade and I don’t like putting that off, so I settle into the armchair with a red pen and start reading.
At the fifth paper I stop.
Amalia Sanchez.
A smile pulls at my mouth because there’s something about this girl that makes my pulse pick up, and I still haven’t figured out what it is.
