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I know that expression too.

"You knew something last night."

"I suspected."

"What?"

He turns back toward the city. "Money at this scale has uses."

"Everything has uses. That's generally why currency remains popular."

"Elena."

His tone kills the joke before I finish enjoying it. I close the laptop halfway.

"Tell me."

He turns.

"Weapons. Mercenaries. Politicians. Police. Judges. Intelligence. Safe houses. Transportation. Assassinations."

The list lands one item at a time, and my gaze returns to the spreadsheet.

Three hundred and sixty-eight million verified. Possibly far more.

I think of Petros with a symbol carved into his body.

Kalliopi dead.

Nikos.

The heirs.

A car accelerating toward us.

All those tiny deductions nobody cared enough to investigate. Pennies becoming thousands. Thousands becoming millions. Millions sitting patiently behind walls nobody knew existed.

"This isn't an embezzlement scheme," I say.

"No."

"It's financing."

"Looks that way."

"For whom?"

"I don't know."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

I hate those words more when he says them.

I turn back to the map and study the five families connected by streams of money they never knew they were contributing. Someone has spent years taking almost nothing from each transaction because almost nothing, repeated often enough, becomes an empire of its own.

And whoever built it understood the Crown intimately.