Page 73

Three years ago, surgery. Public charity board minutes mention that he took a six-week medical leave. I search the dates. Nothing. Not one charge. The fee disappears for forty-one days. It returns two days after he resumes work.

My skin prickles, and I go back five years.

Vacations? Silence.

Return? Fee.

Again, and again and again.

The pattern becomes so clean I no longer need to convince myself. Dimitris Karras has been touching the money.

For years.

I don't know whether he's OB6. I don't know whether he created the network. But he's inside it. I stand so quickly that my chair rolls backward and hits the cabinet.

Adrianos is in his office. I grab the laptop, then stop.

No.

If I'm going to put a seventy-one-year-old Crown banker in front of Adrianos, I'm not bringing excitement.

I'm bringing evidence.

I spend another twenty minutes building the case. Fee schedule. Restructuring documents. Transaction records. Timestamps. OB6 movements. Karras's access. Absence periods. Return dates.

I arrange everything chronologically. Only when the pattern can survive somebody actively trying to destroy it do I pick up the laptop.

Adrianos is on the phone when I enter his office. He looks at me once and ends the call without saying goodbye. Apparently my face has become informative.

"What?"

"I found something."

He gestures to the chair, but I don't sit.

"Do you know Dimitris Karras?"

Adrianos's expression doesn't change, but something behind it does.

"Yes."

"How well?"

"Why?"

"Answer first."

His eyes narrow.

There are very few people in the world who could probably speak to Adrianos this way and retain all their original limbs.

I'm becoming recklessly comfortable with being one of them.

"He's run Asterion's private operations for decades," Adrianos says. "He handled accounts for my father."

"Yours?"

"Some."