Page 21 of Mane in Finance

"The files he pulled last night weren't his embezzlement trail. He wouldn't run toward his own evidence." I keep my eyes locked on his so he can't drift. "The master database is what he's took. Every location. Every route. Every protected name on the continent, in one encrypted package, in a bag in his car."

The mug is still in his line of sight. He glares at it instead of me for a second, then back.

"Nineteen houses," he says. "Everyone who ever believed we could make them disappear."

"Yes."

"He watched me build them."

His hand has curled into a fist at his side, slow, and I reach down and open it with mine, finger by finger, until his hand is holding mine instead of itself.

"Don't," I say. "Whatever sentence you're about to start, the one where this is your fault for not seeing him, put it down."

"You saw him in three weeks." It comes out rough.

"You saw him as a friend, because he spent every year making sure that's all you'd see." I bring his hand up between us. "You trust people who earn it. That's not the crack he slipped through, Lucian. That's the reason there were nineteen houses to betray. A man who trusts no one protects no one. He took the best thing about you and turned it into a knife. That's his. It will never be yours."

He stares down at our hands, then at my face, and the Alpha disappears. What's left is just a tired man who learned that love and betrayal wore the same face throughout his life.

"You keep catching me," he says.

"You catch me in alleys." I don't look away. "I catch you in the rooms you can't stand in straight. We're going to get every file back before anything happens. Say it with me so I know you're present and not still elsewhere."

The corner of his mouth moves, barely. "We get it back."

"Together."

"Together."

He drives home. I work with the laptop open on my knees, and I feel his glances every few miles to check that I'm still certain, so I make sure he can see that I am.

"Here's what he doesn't know he did," I say, not looking up. "I can tie it to his body, to a federal standard, the second he surfaces anywhere." I flag the timestamp and lock it. "And the database is encrypted. It's worthless to a buyer until someone unlocks it, and that's not a handoff in a parking lot. That's a meeting, a location, machines, people, time."

"How much time?"

"Days, if we're lucky. He has to reach a buyer, prove it's real, and decrypt it. Money is the one language I read better than he does. He doesn't realize the years he hid it left an accent for me to find."

Lucian takes his hand off the gearshift and folds it around mine, hard.

"Then find where it's going," he says.

"There's one name that keeps surfacing around the buyer network," I say. "Lincoln Cantu. They call him the Collector. He isn't just another buyer, Lucian. From everything I can trace, he's the one holding the syndicate together. I will find where it's all going. Him and Clifford are about to learn they ran straight toward the one person who was always going to catch them."

18

LUCIAN

My study holds more supernatural authority than has stood in one room in thirty years by noon, and every face turned toward me is waiting to hear how badly I've failed to keep our secret, and protect those that needed protecting.

Kian arrived first, on foot again, and took the chair nearest the door out of habit. Kurtis fills the couch and half the one beside it. The two neighboring lion Alphas I called in the dark hours drove through the night, one from the coast, one down from the north country, and they sit stiff and unhappy, because Ashcrofts summon other prides only when something has already gone very wrong. Hector stands at my shoulder. Sophie sits at the head of the map table where I put her, and I see the northern Alpha clock her as human.

"I'll give it to you plain," I say. "Our financial network was compromised from inside. Our own CFO. He's held the position for twenty-five years. Last night he stole the master database, and we have reason to believe he's running it to a buyer."

The coastal Alpha is on her feet before I finish. "Every location. In one file."

"I'm afraid so."

"Ashcroft, that file has my people in it." Her voice climbs. "Forty families I sent to your routes because your family swore they were the safest. You mean to tell me a bookkeeper has been holding the knife to all…"