Page 107 of Cruel Lies

Thecompany.Hercompany.

It could be mine, at the snap of my fingers.

I don't think there's a word in the English language for how that makes me feel.

"And the second thing?" I rasp.

Navi exhales. When he speaks again, the humor's gone out of his voice.

"The second thing is why I'm calling on a Saturday. Remember those little red flags in the ledger? The discrepancies Pyotr left behind?"

"I remember."

"Somebody queried one."

Everything in me goes still.

"Queried it how?"

"By the looks of it, it's an outside party. It seems as though they pulled a filing on one of the shells. Nothing dramatic yet—it could easily be nothing, just some bot scraping legal files, or some junior analyst who fat-fingered the case number. But it could be something." He drags on the cigarette again. "And there are a lot of bad forms of 'something.' FBI, SEC, federal regulators. Or somebody underground who doesn't love us poking around to see what shakes loose." He hesitates. "I don't like it, Ro. I don't like not knowing."

I look out at the dark street. A car passes, its headlights sweeping the parked cars, then gone.

I don't say anything.

"So here's my thinking," Navi goes on. "We push the Meadows deal through now. Fast. This week. We get the engine in-house, we point it at our own books before anybody outside can, we find every one of Pyotr's little mistakes and clean them up before the party who's asking questions gets close enough to ask a real one. It could be all handled very quickly. But we gotta do itnow,while we've still got a comfortable margin, instead of waiting around for you to work up the nerve."

Again, I don't respond right away. I stand on Calista Meadows's front stoop with her children asleep upstairs and her taste still on my mouth, and I think about pushing a button that takes the thing she loves most and rips it out from under her.

"I want to wait," I say.

The silence on the other end is almost painful.

"Wait," Navi repeats. "You want to…wait."

"Not long. A week. Two."

"Ro, are you listening?" he says, aghast. "You just heard me say somebody's asking questions. You understand what that means, don't you? That's the whole reason we needed her tool in the first place. Waiting could get us exposed. Or locked up. Or killed."

But I'm as stubborn as they come, and now that I've said it out loud, I know the path I intend to take. "I want to do it right."

"You want to do itright, or you don't want to do it at all?"

My answer is all the answer he needs.

"That's what I thought." He exhales, long and slow, and I can picture the smoke rolling out of him, up into the ceiling shadows. "You know, back when this was a plan on paper, it was easy. I just never pegged you for the kind of guy who gets cold feet."

I put my free hand against the warm iron of the stoop railing and grip it until my knuckles ache. "What's the rush? We have time."

"Maybe we do, maybe we don't. If it's a junior analyst at some bank somewhere having a slow week, we've got months. If it's the front end of a federal agency with a subpoena behind it, I'm already too late making this call." Another impatient drag. "The longer you dawdle, the faster the clock runs. You taught me that."

I feel as sick as Hayden upstairs. A strange mix of anger, regret, and the unease of a wild animal backed into a corner.

"Give me the week," I say. "If anything moves—if someone so much as twitches toward anything that matters—you call me and we go that hour. But you don't push anything without me. Understand?"

Navi is quiet for a beat.

"You know what your problem is?" he says finally.