Page 23 of Mane in Finance

"Yet we still got robbed blind." I hold his gaze. "Maybe the tradition wasn't protecting us as well as we believed. She's the reason we have a chance to fix this. Standing's the least she's earned."

He inclines his head. It costs him, and he does it anyway, and around the room the others follow, and I feel something shift under two centuries of habit.

Later, Sophie stands watching the taillights thread down the mountain.

"You didn't have to do that," she says. "The speech. I don't need four Alphas to like me."

"You have the authority to use them without arguing for anything." I stand beside her. "That wasn't for you. It was for the forty families that coastal Alpha carries in her head. They need everyone to answer you fast, and people do that when the Alpha's put his name behind you." I glance sideways. "Also it was a little for you."

She almost smiles. "Find Clifford first. Compliment me after."

"Then let's find him." I watch the last car reach the valley floor. "Before that file finds a buyer."

19

SOPHIE

The spending spike surfaces at 6:14 on Thursday morning, and by seven I've talked myself into going alone.

It's exactly the pattern I told Alphas to expect. A short-term industrial lease on a shipping facility outside town, paid through a shell I recognize because I've been swimming in its cousins for weeks. A power account reactivated after two years dormant. Two specialist contractors booked fast and paid double. It's the infrastructure of a decryption job, and it's forty minutes from where I'm sitting, and every instinct I've built over a career is screaming go confirm it before you send men into a building on a hunch.

Lucian's in the city chasing Clifford's known contacts with Hector. The manor's half-empty. I drive past, photograph the lot, confirm the power draw with my own eyes, and turn around. I tell myself a woman in a Subaru photographing an industrial park is invisible like a convoy of shifters isn't. I didn't tell anyone where I'm going, I just left a note, because I know exactly what Lucian would say and I can't be bothered arguing about it.

The facility sits at a dead road, chain-link and corrugated steel, a loading dock with two trucks backed against it. Refrigerated trucks. My pulse kicks. I pull off behind a stand of scrub, raise my phone to catch the plates, and that's when the passenger door of my own car opens, because I was so busy watching the building that I never checked my mirrors.

"Ms. Holt." The woman sliding into my passenger seat is athletic, black hair to her shoulders, and she holds the gun in her lap with a boredom like she knows I'll obey. "You've cost my organization a great deal of money. Hands on the wheel. We're going to drive in, since you came a fair distance."

They take my phone and my laptop at the dock, and the loss of the laptop hurts worse than being pointed at by a gun, because the laptop is the only thing that's ever made me dangerous.

But I've got maybe thirty seconds while they zip-tie my wrists to find the exits. There's a terminal open on a workbench, a live session, someone's careless mid-transfer window. I can't reach it of course, but I don't need my hands. I just need eyes, and I read the screen fast, total, filing it where they can't take it from me. A directory tree, a decryption progress bar sitting at twenty percent. A shipment manifest with six line items and a departure time forty hours out. I memorize the manifest, the percentage, and the name of the drive they're unlocking, and I understand with a cold drop that twenty percent means they haven't cracked it yet, which means I'm not too late, and there's still something to fight for.

They walk me past a caged section of the warehouse floor, and I look, because someone has to be able to say what's here. A handful of people are moving through here in transit, a bear-broad man with his wrist chained who meets my eyes and flicks away fast to protect me from the crime of having seen him.

The woman, Helena, one of the guards calls her, pushes me into a folding chair in a glass-walled office that overlooks the floor. And then the door opens, and the last piece drops into place, and I'm honestly almost relieved to have it confirmed.

Clifford Stanley looks exactly like his file. Distinguished. Gray. A good suit even here, even now. He sets a cup of gas-station coffee down like we're colleagues, and his eyes are the coldest thing I've seen.

"Ms. Holt. The auditor." His voice is warm, which is worse than if it weren't. "I've read a great deal about you. I confess I'm an admirer. Do you know, in twenty-five years, no one came as close as you did in three weeks? It's almost a shame."

"Almost. You're at twenty percent, Clifford. Your decryption's crawling. You built a hell of an encryption on that database, I'd know, I've been living in your work for a month, and now it's biting you. It's just as good at keeping you out, clearly."

Something flickers behind his eyes. I've guessed right. The file is fighting him.

"Which is why you're going to reconstruct it for me," he says, smooth. "Rebuilding a decryption key is a smaller ask compared to what you've done already. Do that, and this becomes very comfortable for you. Refuse, and it becomes the opposite. I'm a practical man. I'd rather pay you than break you."

I glare at him, and I think about that nine-year-old doing math in one of the safe houses that this file will erase.

"No," I say.

"I'll double whatever Ashcroft is…"

"I said no. You can say it however you like, Clifford, but you're asking me to give science a little girl, or human beings so they can take them apart. There's no number." I lean back in the folding chair like it's mine. "Here's what you haven't thought of, because you've been a coward at a keyboard instead of present where people can reach you. I know escape isn't needed. Trust me, I know. Money isn't what will save me."

He nods at Helena, and she hauls me up, and as she does I let my zip-tied hands drag across the workbench by the door, and I knock the coffee, hard, over the open terminal, and it sheets across the keyboard in a hissing spray before anyone can move.

"Oops," I say.

Helena's hand cracks across my cheekbone starring my vision, but it's worth it, because the terminal dies behind me. I know I just bought back hours they'll never admit they lost.