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I slowly lift my gaze to him. “Do you have any idea how irritating it is when someone who isn’t an accountant says something sensible about accounting?”

“More or less irritating than discovering the man isn’t entirely decorative?”

I let my gaze travel over his black shirt, expensive watch, and the face responsible for a disturbing number of my recent bad decisions. “Entirely is doing significant work in that sentence.”

His mouth shifts into the almost-smile I have learned to recognize, and something warm moves through me before I can stop it.

Yesterday, I wasn't certain we would get back here. Not to the investigation. We were always going back to that. There are hundreds of millions missing, people are dead, and someone has been digging tunnels beneath the Crown for years. I wasn't certain we would get back to us, whatever that word means when applied to a forensic accountant and a man whose conflict-resolution skills frequently involve firearms.

This morning, Adrianos woke beside me in my apartment, made one phone call, and somehow my kitchen acquired enough breakfast to feed a small army. He didn't order me back to his penthouse. He asked where I wanted to work. I chose his place because the security is better and most of our records are already here, and I am choosing not to examine too closely how much I wanted to return with him.

He slides another sheet toward me. “This date appears twice. Different accounts, different countries, but the same notation.”

“I know.”

“Then why haven't you connected them?”

“Because they don't belong together.”

“According to what?”

I open my mouth, then close it again. Adrianos raises an eyebrow. I hate that eyebrow.

“Fine,” I say. “That was annoyingly useful.”

“I’m improving.”

“Don't get excited.”

A fresh cup of coffee appears beside my hand a few minutes later. I look at it, then at the abandoned cup near my elbow and realize I never noticed him leave the table. The first one is stone cold.

“Thank you.”

He nods and returns to the file without making anything of it.

That is the problem with Adrianos when he isn't threatening people or making decisions that send my blood pressure into orbit. He notices things. Not grand gestures designed to impress me, but small things that are much harder to defend against. Cold coffee. The headache I get when I haven't eaten. The way I rub the back of my neck when I've spent too long staring at a screen. The man can put a bullet through someone's chest without blinking and remember exactly how much sugar I don't take in my coffee.

There should be regulations against that combination.

I drag my attention back to Kalliopi's notes. She left fragments everywhere: numbers in margins, symbols beside transaction dates, tiny marks that looked meaningless when I first found them because I assumed they were shorthand for accounts. A triangle. Two vertical lines. A circle divided through the center. Then combinations that repeat often enough to be deliberate.

II-3.

III-2.

IV-1.

Sometimes the notation appears beside an account. Sometimes beside a date. Sometimes beside nothing I can identify.

Kalliopi knew how I think. That matters.

If she wanted to hide information from whoever might be watching her while leaving a path someone like me could eventually follow, she wouldn't build that path from something requiring a cryptography doctorate. She would use patterns. Structure. Something ordinary enough to escape notice until you knew it wasn't ordinary.

I pull one of her handwritten pages closer and push it toward Adrianos. “Tell me what you see.”

He moves his chair around the table until he is beside me, his shoulder brushing mine as he leans over the paper. “A woman with terrible handwriting.”

“Useful.”