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I lean closer.

"She was working on this?"

Elena nods.

"Before she died."

Volkov says something through the phone, but neither of us responds.

Elena opens another of Kalliopi's files and begins comparing dates. The earliest transfer we can see sits behind the same encrypted structure Kalliopi had been trying to penetrate.

"She knew," Elena whispers.

"Knew what?"

Her eyes move across the dates.

Then she looks at me.

The grief in her face has been replaced by something sharper.

Understanding.

"We've been asking the wrong question."

I wait.

Elena turns the screen toward me, showing years of hidden transactions stretching backward beyond the murders that started this investigation.

"Kalliopi wasn't trying to find where the money went."

She taps the earliest encrypted record.

"She was trying to find when it began."

And judging by how far back these numbers reach, whatever is coming for the Crown didn't start with us.

It has been waiting for us for years.

27

Elena

By nine in the morning, I have decided Kalliopi hated me.

There is no other reasonable explanation for the seventeen pages of handwritten symbols spread across Adrianos’s dining table, three encrypted files refusing to surrender anything useful, and a column of numbers that has led me in a perfect circle twice. I stare at the screen until the figures blur, rub my eyes, and return to the same sequence I have been trying to break for the last forty minutes.

“They’re wrong,” I mutter.

Adrianos looks up from the file he is reading across from me. “The numbers?”

“The pattern.”

“You’ve said that three times.”

“Because it has been wrong three times.”

“Then perhaps stop trying the same pattern.”