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“We tried. Encrypted drop box. We lean on him, he lawyers up. We lean harder, we’re in the headlines again for it.”

I stood and buttoned my jacket.

“Then we stop leaning,” I said. “And start digging.”

We went in before the sun cleared the mountains: Six men, a locksmith who kept his eyes on the lock and nowhere else, and me, standing back from the door until it swung open. The newspaper offices sat in a strip mall off Charleston between a nail salon and a shuttered video store. The kind of building no one would rob twice. I understood the logic. I’d built my own shell companies on the same principle.

Yuri’s men already had the night editor and two junior staffers seated in the break room, hands flat on a laminate table covered with coffee rings. I pulled out the chair across from the editor, sat, and folded my hands.

“Tell me about your source,” I said.

His mug sat in front of him. His hand found the handle and didn’t lift it. I watched his knuckles whiten and fade.

“I don’t… there’s no name. It’s all through the drop box. I’ve told the others—”

“Tell me again.”

He did. Same story, same details, just faster, the words tripping over each other. I asked him three more questions I already knew the answers to. His story didn’t shift. I watched his eyes instead of his mouth while he answered—no flicker toward the door, no pause before a lie forming. Just a middle-aged man clutching a cold mug with both hands.

I nodded once and stood.

The men searched the office anyway. Filing cabinets were emptied onto the floor, drawers pulled out and stacked, a laptop bagged for Yuri’s tech to gut. Most of it gave me nothing. I flipped through a stack of printed drafts myself, page by page, because I trusted my own eyes over anyone else.

On the fourth article’s draft, in the margin, in handwriting pressed hard enough to dent the page, I read a description of the casino floor. The description wasn’t one a visitor could give.

I read it, then read it again.

I set the page down flat on the desk and stood very still. Somewhere on my own floor, under my own lights, someone had watched money move with their own eyes and decided to hand what they saw to a stranger.

My hand, resting on the desk, closed slowly into a fist. I straightened my cuffs, one and then the other, and walked out past the editor without looking at him again.

In the car, I ran through faces. Dealers who’d dealt my tables for a decade. Security who watched every camera feed I owned. Waitresses who moved through VIP rooms in heels and short dresses. Someone on that list had been watching and reporting for months, probably years, without a single slip. I turned my signet ring once around my finger and stopped.

“Search inside. Quietly,” I told Yuri. “No manhunt. Nobody on that floor knows we’re looking. You watch, you listen, you report to me. No one else.”

“And when we find them?”

I looked out the window. “Then we’ll see exactly how clever they really are.”

*****

That evening I stood at the glass again, jacket off, sleeves still buttoned at the wrist out of habit rather than comfort. Below me, the floor lit up gold and violet, tables filling, waitresses weaving trays through the crowd like any other night.

I stood there long after there was any reason to. My reflection hung faintly over the lights, arms crossed. Somewhere down there, under the neon, was someone smart enough to slip past every safeguard I’d built and careful enough to leave nothing behind.

It was even more annoying because they were good enough to impress me—not that I’d admit that to anyone. Whoever it was, they were smart enough to create layers of protection.

I found myself leaning closer to the glass, tracing the crowd table by table, looking for the one shape that didn’t move the way the others did.

I didn’t find it. I stayed at the window until the coffee in my hand went cold. For the first time in a long time, I felt really challenged.

Time to see how long their protection holds.

Chapter Three

Camila

My hands shook while I clipped on the earrings, so I set them down, pressed my palms flat against the bathroom counter, and counted to ten the way Dr. Feldman had taught me two years ago, before Dr. Feldman became too expensive. Four months of work sat in a shoebox under my bed—witness statements, USB drives, and a leather notebook with names I’d memorized so well I could recite them backward. Tonight all of it either paid off or I failed; I couldn’t picture a middle ground.