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Nothing in this place matched, but nothing needed to. It worked for Cass, and that was all that mattered. It wasn’t like anyone ever came here anyway.

The routing loop she’d been stuck on for two days was on her monitor waiting for her. She’d been dreading it all week, but now, she leaned in. The structure of the routing kept folding back on itself in a way that was either clever or sloppy, and she couldn’t tell which yet.

Good. She wanted it to be clever. It was the first thing in weeks that hadn’t bored her on contact.

She wanted something to fight.

Ever since Fallon Hemingway, Cassandra’s literal partner in crime of three years, had joined Team Superheroes—or whatever that secret division of Zodiac Tactical was called—Cassandra had been relegated down to knitting projects.

No more taking down wealthy predators who destroyed lives and never faced consequences. No more having something that had her jumping out of bed every morning to get started, even if the work was complicated and dangerous.

All she’d had for the past four months was knitting and a disco playlist.

No point in bitching about it. At least she was still doing some good, even if it wasn’t anything close to the type of work she and Fallon had done.

She focused back on the routing loop from the other direction, starting with the receiving account and moving backward. Her left hand pulled transaction logs while her right pulled corporate filings. Two angles went nowhere, but a third caught an edge.

Damn it. It wasn’t clever as she’d hoped. It was sloppy. The target had filed two of his shell companies under slightly different versions of the same address, which meant they shared a registered agent, which meant the accounts resolved to the same beneficial owner, which meant⁠—

“Are you kidding me.” Her fingers stopped. “That’s where you’ve been putting it? Right there?”

It was a brokerage account under a name she recognized from the original pension fund filings. Four layers of corporate fiction, three weeks of patient stitching, and he’d parked the money three degrees from his own name.

All that work, and the ending was a typo on a corporate filing.

She sat back and looked at it. The money trail, the shell companies, the brokerage account. It was done. The veterans would get their money back, and the target would eventually figure out he’d been robbed by someone he’d never meet and could never catch.

That should have felt like a victory lap. It felt more like finishing a crossword puzzle on a long flight.

She set up the reroute, staggering transfers over the next seventy-two hours. She pulled from the brokerage and deposited into the accounts of eleven veterans whose pension disbursements had been coming up short. The amounts would read as correction adjustments. Nobody would flag them.

By the time this guy noticed his balance was off, the money would already be where it was supposed to be.

She executed the sequence. Watched the first transfer clear. Then the second.

“Later, gator. It has been anything but a pleasure.”

She turned the music down and leaned back in her chair. The disco was still playing, but she didn’t feel like dancing anymore.

That was the thing nobody said about being good at something that didn’t challenge you. The wins still felt good. They just didn’t last.

She and Fallon would have turned a target like this into a full operation. Identified him, built the exposure case, stolen everything worth taking, and left a signature tucked into his pocket at a public event. A pension statement. A canceled check. Something personal, something that said we figured out what you did, and there was no way in hell we were letting you get away with it.

But now, Cassandra had three more knitting projects in her queue. A church treasurer embezzling from the building fund. A county official skimming disaster relief grants. A third she’d only started preliminary research on.

She could do this in her sleep. That was the problem.

She opened the church treasurer file and started reading. The numbers blurred together almost immediately, her brain refusing to engage with another set of transactions that would take a couple weeks to unravel and seconds to forget. She made herself read anyway.

Her phone alarm went off. 2:47. Her stomach tightened.

Tuesday. Pharmacy day.

She was down to her last three migraine pills, and the pharmacy’s slowest window was Tuesdays between 3:00 and 3:20, after the lunch-rush prescriptions had been collected and before the post-work crowd arrived. She’d tracked it over enough visits to be sure. If she left now, she’d have the counter mostly to herself.

Not as good as having the meds delivered, but delivery meant her address and legal name in a database. Her work with Fallon had never allowed that—too dangerous. So she had to do it the hard way.

Her glasses were on the hook by the front door. She put them on and caught herself in the hallway mirror.