Echo stands by the monitors, his face lit by the blue glare of the scrolling data. "If we don't fix this by tomorrow, the whole supply line goes dark. We’re bleeding profit, Boss."
I don't answer. I keep staring at the screen, hunting a pattern I can't find. The old irritation starts up under my ribs, the kind that usually ends with something broken. It isn't only money. It's control. And Silas is still out there, playing a game I haven't finished winning.
The steel doors hiss open.
I don't look up. It should be a guard, probably, or another report from the perimeter teams. I don't expect Atara.
She walks in with a steady, deliberate stride. No leggings, no oversized sweater. Charcoal silk blouse and trousers, hair pulled back into a sharp ponytail. She looks like she stepped off an elevator forty floors up, completely wrong for a concrete bunker, and she owns the room anyway.
"You're interrupting a strategy session," I say. It comes out gruff. I don't tell her to leave. I watch the way she moves, shoulders squared, chin level.
She doesn't respond to my words at all. She ignores Kieran and Echo and walks straight to the table, pulls a stack of papers from a slim folder, and slides them across the wood toward me.
"I have something you need," she says. No edge, no charm. Just flat and professional.
I look down, expecting another argument, another bid for her release.
It's a flow chart. Wire transfer receipts. A signature verification. I go still and start turning pages, names, dates, the numbers behind the numbers. It's an audit. A deep one. Nine years of records cross-referenced against shipment manifests and the personal expenses of Vance, my head of accounting. The Cayman receipts. The software logs. Clean.
"How?" I ask.
"You were looking for a security breach." She tilts her chin, watching me with that quick, defiant intelligence I've started to want around. "You were looking at the guards. You should've been looking at the balance sheet. Money leaves a trail, Lorcan. You just have to know how to read it."
I look up at her.
This is nothing I expected. I know she’s a smart woman, and it always takes me by surprise, but a clean audit? She had been working on this.
I've been trying to cage her to keep her safe, and the whole time she's been sharper than anything I've ever held. She's a partner. I'm happy she's here—stupidly, simply happy, and I don't know what to do with it. I look at the file, then back at her.
"Kieran." My voice drops.
"Yeah, boss?"
"Bring Vance down here. Alone."
Atara doesn't blink. She just watches me, her eyes dark and unreadable.
"You sure?" Kieran's hand moves toward his sidearm.
"Look at the file."
He leans over and scans it. A low curse leaves him. "Son of a bitch."
"Take him," I say.
Vance sits in a wooden chair, hands on his knees. Older, gray at the temples, in a suit worth more than a guard earns in a year. He looks composed, but his eyes keep moving, checking the shadows.
He sees me and stands, the polite smile already in place. "Lorcan. I'm not sure what the urgency is, but—"
"Sit down, Vance."
I pull up a second chair and sit directly across from him, placing the ledger Atara has compiled on the table between us. I slide it forward until it hits his knuckles.
He looks at the ledger. He doesn't touch it.
"I don't understand," he says.
"You’ve been skimming since the second quarter of last year," I say. My voice is conversational. "You route the difference through a shell company. You use the logistics software to hide the gaps. It is clever, Vance. It is also the reason you are not going to be walking out of here."
