Page 29 of Mane in Finance

Every instinct I own screams to break cover and protect her from this, but I stay put. She moves with confidence, unremarkable confidence, a figure that reads as one more contractor among the mercenaries and technicians the buyers brought. She slips through the side door Kurtis marked on the blueprint, into the part of the complex where the old server room still has power and network because I had Hector make sure of it. Then she's gone from my sight, swallowed by the building, and I have to trust the walls will keep her alive.

My earpiece clicks, and her voice threads through.

"I'm at the terminal. Same subnet as the main floor. I can see their session." A pause, keys moving. "Clifford's setting up in the central bay. He's got the drive. He hasn't connected it yet, he's making them wait, making a show of it. Greedy men do love an audience." Another beat. "Hold everyone, Lucian. The second that drive goes live, I'll tell you. Not one claw before then."

"Understood." I pass it down the line with a hand signal, and fifty fighters go from ready to coiled. "Every position holds for Sophie's mark. Nobody breathes on that building until she calls it."

Kian's voice, barely a breath over the frequency: "Any captives?"

"Unknown. If there are any inside, wolves and bears prioritize getting them out."

Hector checks the final positions through his scope. "Rail sealed. South road covered. Nobody gets a vehicle out unless we choose to let them."

"Good. Buyers stay alive if possible. I want names, accounts, and whoever they answer to after tonight." I glance once toward the maintenance entrance Sophie disappeared through. "But nobody breaks formation for Clifford. The database comes first, Sophie kills that file, then we deal with whoever's still standing."

The wait stretches, and then Sophie's voice sharpens, and everything I've held in check for an hour gets ready to come off the leash.

"He's connecting it." Her words come fast now, fingers audible under them. "Clifford just seated the drive. He's walking Cantu through the authentication, proving it's legitimate, showing them the directory tree so they'll pay. The connection's going live. It's reaching out. I've got it." A breath. "My code's on the wire. It's fighting his security exactly like I said it would. I'm in it, Lucian. I'm attacking. Go. Go now, while he's staring at the screen and not the doors."

I'm already moving before she finishes the word.

"All positions, strike." My own voice is now a roar, not quite human anymore. "Wolves and bears to any captives. Hector, seal the exits. Nobody named on that list walks out of here."

Kian's wolves hit the east and west faces, and the mercenaries discover outside was never empty. Kurtis' bears blast up out of the concrete shells the buyers thought were rubble, and chaos erupts. Glass shatters around everyone, an alarm starts to wail. Through it all I hear the mayhem of people running. Cantu's commanders shouting positions that no longer exist, buyers scrambling for cars Hector's teams have already rigged, and stopped from moving.

I cross the open ground toward the main bay, and I catch one glimpse through a shattered loading door. Sophie, hunched at a terminal in the glow of a screen, her face lit and utterly focused, hands flying, doing what she does while the world burns around her.

The space fills with mercenaries pouring out of the bay, I shift into lion form. It takes me fast and complete, gold pouring over me, my frame increasing and towering others. The mercenaries between me and the fight understand that the assessment they were briefed on was wrong, and the ones who can run, run. The ones that don't learn why they should have.

I tear through them, letting only the mercenaries scarper, but making sure the buyers, and more importantly, Lincoln, Helena, and Clifford are not any of those running.

I realize those three have concluded they are not in the safest place, and they've walked into their own graves. I put my head down and go find Lincoln first, and the war closes over the plant like a fist.

25

SOPHIE

The war outside the network closet is a muffled roar through eighteen inches of concrete, and it stays that way, because the only battlefield that matters to me is thirty inches wide and glowing under my hands.

I found this room off the blueprint Kurtis marked, a hardened equipment vault the plant's old operators built to outlast a chemical fire. Thick doors, its own power feed, exactly the place a paranoid buyer would route a millions of dollars worth of verification through, which is why Clifford chose it, and why I chose to be sitting inside it before he arrived. His session runs on the same subnet I'm on. I can watch his keystrokes scroll past without laying eyes on him, two bays over, walking Cantu and the buyers through it to prove the file is real. My failsafe is already riding his connection, but it's losing.

"Come on," I breathe. "Not now. Do not do this to me now."

His security is better than I predicted. The failsafe was supposed to slip in behind the authentication handshake and start rotting the master from the inside. Instead it keeps slamming into a wall I didn't plan for, an integrity watchdog that notices the instant a protected file starts to degrade and severs the connection to save it. Twice it's tried to cut me loose. Twice I've clawed the session back before it dropped.

So I stop running it and start lying to the guard dog, which is the entire reason I fought Lucian to be here and not a safe one or two counties away. I can't overpower the watchdog. I can convince it nothing's wrong. I rewrite the corruption so every byte I destroy reports back as verified and intact, the file cheerfully telling its own protector that everything's fine while I hollow it out from the center. Slower, and uglier. The progress marker starts to crawl forward, and I finally let out a sigh I've been holding since I sneaked in.

The heavy door bangs open behind me. I don't turn. Turning costs half a second I don't have, and I already know from the unhurried footsteps who it is before he opens his mouth.

"Ms. Holt." Clifford's voice level even now, even with a battle chewing through the building around us. "I should have guessed. When the verification began fighting me, first I thought it was Cantu's people being sloppy. It never once occurred to me it'd be you." A note of something almost like admiration. "How long have you been in here, quietly compromising my future?"

"Long enough." My hands don't leave the keys.

He steps into the screen's glow, and his gaze drops to the progress marker, and the calm he had cracks a frown line.

"Stop," he says. "Just stop and hear me. You're about to burn the most valuable thing that has ever existed, but you don't have to. Cantu's finished, his people are dying in the halls. But the database was never his. It's mine. And it can still be yours." The warmth comes out then, the thing that ran a whole company for twenty-five years. "Two hundred million, more. I have buyers Cantu never knew existed. You and I walk out of here as two, soon to be rich. You'd never sit under a boutique firm's fluorescent lights again. You'd create your own business."

For one ugly second I understand exactly how he lasted so long. He's good, he's warm, he's certain, and he hands you what you really want in life.