Page 17

The door’s ajar, and I knock with two knuckles and push at the same time, which isn’t knocking, it’s more announcing my presence, and the words are already spilling. “I found the second one, it’s a signature, an actual signature. The rounding gives him up, and the timing confirms it, and I need you to look before I lose the thread of how it fits, because it fits, it absolutely fits, and I—”

He’s standing at the window in nothing but black underwear, and the rest of the sentence walks off a cliff.

I built a whole opinion off the suits, but that opinion was incomplete data. The suit was hiding the argument. He’s lean like a blade, nothing on him that doesn’t work, olive skin over muscle earned in rooms I’d rather not picture, a hard line down the center of him, the cut of his hips vanishing into the waistband, and there’s a great deal of him the underwear isn’t bothering to keep private. My eyes run the inventory before my professionalism gets a vote, down and back up, and finish on his face, where he’s already fighting a smile.

“Take your time,” he says. “I enjoy watching you lose an argument with your own eyes.”

“I’m not losing anything; I’m collecting evidence. It’s the job.” I grab the door frame, the only solid thing in reach. “Sorry. You’re not. Decent. I’ll come back; this can be a morning thing. I respect a morning.”

“Come here.”

Two words, no hurry in them, his chin tipping me forward, and my feet take it as instruction before the rest of me votes. I cross the carpet with the laptop hugged to my chest like a breastplate, the only barrier I’ve got, and a thin one.

“You always answer your door like this?”

“It’s my bedroom. I answer it however I sleep. Besides, it’s not like you waited for my answer anyway before barging in.” His eyes go down me once, the sweater, the sleep leggings, the bare feet on his warm floor. “You ran through my house at midnight in that. We’re both improvising.”

“I ran because I cracked another part of your conspiracy, you’re welcome, and nobody told me the dress code in this wing was a public safety hazard.” I clutch the laptop tighter. “Stop smiling. You don’t get to smile about that part.”

“I’m not smiling; I’m delighted. There’s a difference, and you, of all people, want me using the right word. Show me.”

So I show him, and talking’s the rope I climb back up, the one thing in this room I know how to do. “Two markers. First is timing, every disbursement fires three days after the matching receivable clears, like a man who set a rule once and never let anyone else touch it. Second’s the tell, watch the cents.” I tilt the screen and scroll, and he leans in to follow my finger, and the heat off his bare chest reaches the side of my arm before the rest of him does. “Every figure rounds to the same two decimals. Across eleven shells that are supposed to be strangers. Nobody rounds like that by accident. It’s his habit, and a habit is a person.”

“What does it tell us?”

“That’s the part I don’t have yet. It doesn’t name him.” I keep scrolling, because stopping means looking up, and up’s close. “But every shell with this fingerprint is one hand, so I stop treating them as eleven problems and start treating them as one trail, and a trail has an end, and at the end there’s a man. We’re a step closer. I can’t tell you which door yet. Only that there’s a door now that we didn’t have before.”

“You’re sure.”

“I’m never unsure; it’s exhausting, and it’s accurate.” I run out of screen. “He’s findable. He wasn’t before. That’s worth waking you up, or it would be if you’d been asleep, which you weren’t, you were brooding at a window in your underwear like the cover of a book my mother hides from her church group.”

“You’re thinking about your mother’s church group right now?”

“My brain doesn’t pick its moments. You’ve met it.”

He doesn’t answer, and the quiet changes texture. I become aware, all at once and far too late, of the geography of this, that I’m a hand’s width from a near-naked man at midnight with a laptop for a chaperone, that his body heat’s rolling off him in a front I can feel down my whole left side, that the thin sweater hides about as much from him as the underwear hides from me.

And the bathroom at Lux comes back with no warning at all. Not the memory, the body of it. The tile on my spine. His palm flat on my stomach, holding me where he wanted me. The full obscene push of him going in slow and not stopping, the stretch, the sound I made that I never approved. It floods up from somewhere I keep bolted, and a noise comes out of my throat before I can catch it, low and involuntary and nothing to do with routing numbers.

He hears it. Of course he does, the man hears me think, and his attention comes off the screen and onto me, and he leans in.

“Where did you just go?”

“Nowhere. A receivable. Deeply unsexy, you’d hate it.”

“You’re a terrible liar for a woman who reads them professionally.” He lifts the laptop out of my arms, slow enough that I could stop him, and sets it on the dresser, and now I’ve got no breastplate and nowhere to put my hands. “You went to Lux. Your breathing’s doing the same thing it did against that wall. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“I want to tell you you’re insufferable, which is adjacent.”

“That’s not a no.” His finger comes under my chin and tips my face up, his breath ghosting over my lips, close enough that the gap’s no distance at all. “Stay. Tell me to put my cock back in my pants and I will, same as you did in this office your first night. But that’s not the sound you made.”

The thing about him is he won’t lie and won’t let me, and the heat in my chest is winning an argument it has never won in twenty-eight years. I want it with a clarity that scares me worse than the men with guns did.

“For the record, this is a terrible idea, you’re my employer, I was kidnapped here, and the power dynamic’s a forensic nightmare.”

“Elena.”

“That’s the first time you’ve used my name.”