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“Three hours. I passed out mid-hating-your-ceiling, which feels like my own nervous system defecting to your side, and I’d like it noted that I did not authorize the nap.”

“Noted.” He’s in a clean suit, which means he slept, or didn’t and changed. Either way, last night’s wreck has been put away with the photo. His eyes move over me once, the sweater, the slacks, and then come back up. My breathing does the same thing it did at the bar when his attention is on me, the hitch I keep not authorizing. I hate that the desk feels too narrow. It’s an enormous desk.

“They fit,” he says.

“Penelope’s the only thing holding this place up, by the way. Be nicer to her than you are to everyone else.” I take the chair without being offered it, mostly to stop standing there letting him look at me. “She also mentioned she changed your diapers. So whatever this is you’re doing across the desk, the menace, the eye thing, I need you to know it’s losing to a mental image of you bald and screaming and in a diaper. Your whole terrifying-man act is getting beaten by an infant. Him. Tiny you. He’s winning.”

“You talk more when you’re rattled.” He sits back, and the smile arrives in no hurry, the whole thing, warm and unfair, worn by a man who’s known for decades exactly what his own face is worth in a room. “I’m beginning to enjoy it. Most people go quiet when I look at them. You become entertaining.”

“I talk more when I’m awake. You’ve met me twice, both times with a head injury’s worth of adrenaline in me, so you don’t actually know what I’m like, you just think you do.” Which I shouldn’t have said, because now I’ve as good as confirmed that he rattles me, but I keep talking because shutting up now would just prove it twice over. “Don’t look pleased. You don’t get to look pleased about that.”

“I’m not pleased.” The grin comes easy, because it always does, his default setting, charm idling under everything he says. “I’m delighted. There’s a difference, and you, of all people, should want me using the right word.”

“See, that’s the problem with you. Most men I can fluster, and they have the decency to hide it. You just admit it and turn it back on me, which is deeply unsporting.” I cross my legs, mostly to do something with myself that isn’t holding his eye. “And you look like hell, by the way. The suit’s an upgrade. The face is the exact one you had on at three in the morning. Whatever ate your night didn’t finish, it’s still in there gnawing.”

He doesn’t answer. The grin goes, not all at once, just slides off and doesn’t come back, and the room gets quieter than the silence strictly needs to be. I hit something. I wasn’t aiming; I never am. My mouth gets to the soft place a half second before my brain flags that there’s a soft place there at all, and now it’s too late.

Penelope’s line comes back to me about there being more than money bleeding in this house.

“Are we skipping the apology?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.

“I don’t apologize for things that worked.” The charm comes back up like a light on a dimmer, smooth, easy, a man who’s decided the bad moment is behind them and simply moved the room past it. “But I’m glad you’re here. That’s the closest you’ll get, and from me it’s practically a sonnet.”

“That is not an apology. That’s you enjoying yourself in the general direction of an apology.”

“It’s the same thing in my house.” He tips his head at the monitor. “Come here. Let me show you what’s worth waking the city to buy you pants.”

So I drag a chair around to his side of the desk, which is its own small surrender, because his side of the desk is close, closer than the work strictly requires, and the second I’m down in it I understand my mistake. There’s no width of dark wood between us now. There’s the arm of his chair against the arm of mine, and the heat coming off him, and the clean expensive nothing-smell of a man who can afford to smell like nothing, and my body files all of it before my brain has signed off on sitting here at all.

He turns the screen and slides a second keyboard across. I sit forward, waiting for the catch, the read-only folder, the curated slice, the assistant hovering to tell me which rooms I’m allowed into, because that’s how this always goes. Men like him hand you a hallway and stand in it. I start reading braced for the wall I’ll hit.

It takes me most of the first hour to understand there isn’t one. Every door I push is open. The holding companies, the shells, the polished Midtown faces on money that’s filthy underneath, years of it, no minder, no slice, no corridor I’m fenced out of. He gave me the whole house and didn’t say so, and I sit there for a second not reading anything at all, because I genuinely can’t tell if that’s the most trust anyone’s shown me professionally or proof he has no idea what I can do with it.

I lean in to read, and he leans in at the same moment to point at a line near the top, and his arm comes across my field of view, and his breath goes warm against the side of my neck, and I lose the entire sentence I was reading. Just lose it. Twenty-eight years of being able to read a balance sheet through a fire alarm, and a man exhales near my jaw, and the numbers turn to wallpaper.

“This entity,” he says, tapping the glass, unbothered, like he can’t feel the inch of air between his mouth and my skin doing what it’s doing. “It pays three others and receives from none. Tell me why that bothers me.”

“It bothers you because you’ve watched too many movies.” My voice comes out almost normal, which I consider a triumph of the human spirit. “Move back. I can’t think with your face in my peripheral vision, it’s very busy back there.”

“I’m pointing at the screen.”

“You’re pointing at the screen from inside my personal airspace, and the airspace has rules, and the rules are new, I’m writing them now, and rule one is your mouth stays a measurable distance from my neck while I work.”

He moves back. Barely. Enough that I can find the sentence again, but not enough that I stop knowing exactly where he is.

Money tells the truth even when every hand on it is lying. That’s the love affair. A man can sit across a table wearing the face of a saint and lie without a tremor, and then his accounts cheerfully report that he flew to Geneva the weekend he swore he was home, that he keeps a second apartment, that the foundation he chairs receives precisely enough to be photographed and not a dollar over. The numbers can’t keep a straight face. You only have to read them, and I learn to read his whole empire over one morning, and what it confesses, slow and then in a rush, is that someone has been stealing from him with a patience that empties my lungs.

This is not laundering. Laundering is a loud business, money in the bath, money out clean and ready to spend. This is the inverse. This is blood let out of a living thing so slowly it never spikes a fever, fractions shaved off honest flows and walked through intermediaries that each read as dull on their own, a leasing outfit, a freight forwarder, every one of them real enough to pass a glance and a second glance. No single account shows it. You catch it the way I’m catching it, by carrying the whole body in your skull at once and feeling for the spot where the pulse comes a half-beat wrong.

It’s beautiful, and I think the word before I can knife it, sitting in the chair of a man I don’t trust, staring at the wound in his fortune, beautiful, because whoever built this is an artist and I’ve spent my life able to admire the brushwork even when it’s aimed at the people I’m meant to defend. This is what Kalliopi saw. I know it the way I know my own hand on a page. She sat somewhere, maybe this exact chair, and she caught the half-beat too, and she chased it, and it must be what buried her.

I don’t cry. I’ve gotten frighteningly good at ignoring it and focusing on work, but the grief arrives regardless, colder today than yesterday’s hot mess at the bar, and colder turns out to be useful.

Adrianos moves in and out of the office all day like weather I’ve quit forecasting. He fills the doorway, says nothing as he watches me work. Each time, I feel the pressure change behind me, so I send him off without turning my head.

“I can’t think with you radiating at the back of my neck.”

“I’m not radiating anything.”