The car pulls away from Keyes, Inc. and Monaco spills past the window in its usual performance of blue and white and money,and I’m thinking about a girl from Idaho who colour-tabs files in quarter-inch intervals and knows the exact mileage between Boise and the Côte d’Azur.
Five thousand miles. She calculated it on the plane.
I loosen my tie. The car is cool, tinted, the leather carrying some scent the service applies to suggest old wealth, and I pull the knot free and let the fabric hang and I think about the yellow tab.
She added a category. A young paralegal from Boise State, newly into a job she got through her aunt, and she flagged a billing discrepancy that three senior associates missed or chose to ignore. She flagged it because it “didn’t fit the overall picture.” She flagged it because it was wrong and she couldn’t bring herself to pretend it wasn’t.
Or because she wanted me to see it.
Kaye’s words from last week are in my ear. The corridor outside conference room three, Kaye with her hand on my arm and her voice dropped to that register.My niece is very bright, Mr. Almazov. Very eager to learn. She understands how things work here, and she’s very willing to make your experience with the firm... comfortable.
I didn’t ask whatcomfortablemeant. I didn’t need to. Keyes, Inc. is a firm wherecomfortablehas only ever meant one thing, and every woman I’ve encountered here has confirmed it: the associates who lean too close, the paralegals who leave doors ajar, the partners who schedule “client dinners” that don’t appear on any calendar.
And now there’s Daisy Fletcher. Blue eyes, sensible shoes, a file tabbed with the exactness of a girl who believes the world runson rules. A girl who flinched when her aunt corrected her and folded her hands in her lap and turned pink from the throat up, and none of it, not one second of it, read like a woman who knows the score.
Which is the point, isn’t it. That’s what makes her exceptional.
I’ve met women at firms like Keyes in Saint Petersburg, in London, in every city where the underworld needs legal cover and the legal cover needs bodies. The ones who play innocent are the most dangerous. They let you believe you’re the one choosing, the one pursuing. They let you run the meeting and ask the personal questions and lean back in your chair and think you’re in control, and by the time you realise the architecture was theirs all along, you’re already inside it.
Daisy Fletcher is the best I’ve ever seen.
The mystery novels. The parents who sent a guidebook to the wrong country. The colour-tabbed file with its quarter-inch intervals and its yellow category for things thatdon’t fit but seem relevant. Every detail is designed to make me believe she’s real, and she delivers them with a sincerity that borders on art.
But the yellow tab nags at me.
Because a woman playing innocent wouldn’t flag a billing discrepancy. A woman playing the game would file it blue and never mention it. A woman who understood what Keyes, Inc. is and how it operates would know that drawing attention to a billing discrepancy is the last thing you do.
Unless the flag was for me. A show of integrity, timed for impact, delivered in front of the client she’s been assigned to impress.
Unless it wasn’t.
The car turns onto the coast road. The Mediterranean opens on the left, all that blue, and I close my eyes and I can see her hands folding in her lap after Kaye shut her down. They didn’t fold gracefully. They gripped each other. The knuckles went white. It was the fold of a woman who wanted to disappear, not a woman who was performing.
I’ve read people for years. I’ve built an empire on it. Andrei handles security, Alexei handles strategy, Artem handles enforcement, and I handle the thing none of them can: I see what people are hiding. It’s a skill. A weapon. The reason every billionaire I’ve met has sat across from me in rooms like that conference room and told me things they’d never tell their wives.
I have never been wrong.
Daisy Fletcher is performing. The tabs, the blush, the five-thousand-mile calculation, the mystery novels. All of it. She’s her aunt’s project, polished and placed in my path, and the yellow tab was the cleverest move of all because it made me hesitate.
I push it away.
My phone buzzes. The screen lights with a name I don’t ignore.
Alexei.
I answer.
My brother’s voice is the same as always: stripped of warmth, efficient, a blade wrapped in syllables. “The name from Mila’s laptop. The second thread.”
I sit forward. “And?”
A pause. Alexei doesn’t pause for drama. He pauses because the information requires it.
“It connects to Keyes.”
The Mediterranean burns past the window. The leather creaks under my hands. And the yellow tab, the girl from Idaho, the billing discrepancy she shouldn’t have noticed and shouldn’t have flagged and shouldn’t have mentioned, rearranges itself in my mind into something that has nothing to do with innocence and everything to do with the mole inside our circle who has been feeding information to the man who killed our father.
Chapter 3
