Page 47 of Hostile

Who would you be if you’d spent ten years building instead of aiming?

I thought about the Hale Foundation. The twelve scholarships. The women I’d never meet, who were sitting in classrooms somewhere right now because the money had arrived, the door had opened, and someone had thought they were worth the investment.

That was building. I’d managed to do both.

I just wasn’t entirely sure, sitting in a French restaurant in Midtown with my fork straightened three times, which one would be left standing when this was over.

Back at my desk by two, I pulled up the acquisition model the way I always did whenever something threatened to destabilize the architecture, because the numbers were clean, didn’t complicate things, and had been the fixed point for six years while everything else moved.

Charlie called at two-thirty. “Nolan found something.” Charlie’s voice carried the note it took when the information was significant. “In the Blair structure.”

I sat up straighter. “Talk to me.”

“The BCA Advisory Group payments—we traced one of the earlier transfers. 2013. Before you started building the position.” I hear laptop keys clicking. “The payment didn’t go to Blair’s operating account. It went through a second vehicle, which then made a disbursement to a personal account registered in Billy Brown’s name.”

The room went very quiet.

“How much?” I asked.

“Forty thousand dollars.” Another pause. “Thirty days before the beach house weekend.”

I set my pen down on the desk with great care. Forty thousand dollars. Thirty days earlier.

That was architecture. Architecture required an architect.

I’d known. I’d suspected. I’d filed it under more complicated and closed the door on it because following that thought to its conclusion meant dismantling the load-bearing wall of everything I’d built, and I hadn’t been ready to do that.

I was going to have to be ready now.

“Send me everything,” I said. “All of it. Tonight.”

“Already uploading.” He paused. “Megan. If Blair paid Billy⁠—”

“I know what it means, Charlie.”

“It means Wyatt might not have⁠—”

“I know what it means.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “Send me the files.”

I set the phone down.

Outside my window, Manhattan moved through its Tuesday afternoon, indifferent as ever. Forty-two floors up, I sat at my desk with the acquisition model open on one screen and six years of architecture on the other, and a plain, unavoidable question I’d been running from for weeks settled into the room around me like dusk—without permission and in no hurry.

Did Wyatt know?

I’d been asking that question for ten years. I’d asked it as a formality, mostly—a question I’d already answered, posed not because I was genuinely uncertain of the answer but because the asking was part of the process.

I was genuinely uncertain now.

I pressed my fingers against the velvet pouch in the bottom drawer without opening it, as I always did, the shape of the arrow familiar under the fabric.

You saw what it looked like. Not what it was.

I withdrew my hand, closed the drawer, then opened the files Charlie had sent. If the answer was in them, I was determined to find it.

That was, after all, what I was good at.

CHAPTER TWENTY