Page 146 of Cruel Lies

"I'm so glad you brought that up!" I say in a sickly-sweet voice with a smile to match. "That brings me to number seven. As you know, the night I found out everything, I answered your phone. Navi's confession was enough on its own, truth be told, but since that's just hearsay, I figured a little extra insurance wouldn't hurt. So, before I left your apartment, I screenshotted the call log of your burner phone, sent it to myself, and deleted the message to cover my tracks. And then I did one more thing." I bring up the second file. "I'm not sure if you even know this, but that burner auto-joined my home WiFi. Meaning my router has a record of every time that device was inside my house. Including the night my mirrors disappeared. It puts you at the scene again and again, Ronan. It means you were fuckingthere."

He doesn't argue. He doesn't do anything, actually.

Time for the final blow.

I take a breath, because the last one is the one I've been dreading.

"Eight. Juliet. The babysitter. The one you vetted. Harvard-educated, CPR certified, bonded, background-checked, references available on request. You sent me a whole file on her. You told me you don't do things halfway."

I advance to the last slide.

"But the source of all of those references and verifications? It traces back through the same shells. The same fingerprints as the forty-one-thousand-dollar invoice. Juliet was your employee, wasn't she? You placed a spy inside my home."

I have to pause before I finish. My throat has closed and it hurts to speak, but I press through.

"Near my goddamnchildren."

The silence in the office is total and devastating.

"So here's the whole story," I say, when I can. "You run a money-laundering operation hiding behind a law firm. My company is the only machine on earth that could expose it. So you stole it. And to get it, you engineered every single part of 'us.' The legal attack was yours. The rescue was yours. The warning about Todd was yours, invented so I'd come running to you scared and hand you everything you'd need to steal my life in the dead of night. You came near mykids,motherfucker."

I slam the laptop closed.

"You never loved me, Ronan. You used me. That's the data. And there's no other conclusion it points to."

I fold my hands on top of the closed laptop and I wait for him to fight. To spin it. To pull out the smooth voice and tell me I've done bad science, that I've drawn a conclusion from an incomplete dataset, that if I hired someone who gave me that report I'd fire them on the spot.

He doesn't.

Instead, Ronan Akov leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, and the strangest thing happens to his face.

It relaxes.

The tension goes out of him all at once, everywhere, like something that's been clenched for years finally letting go. Whenhe opens his eyes again, they're damp and shiny. He's almost smiling, and I don't understand it at all.

"You got all of it," he says quietly. "Every piece. You're the only person alive who could have."

"Don't you dare condescend to?—"

"I'm not going to lie to you, Calista. Not anymore. I don't think I can, even if I wanted to." He sits forward, elbows on the desk. "You want the truth? Here it is. All of it."

And then he just tells me.

He tells me he's thepakhan. That means the head of the whole thing, the Akov Bratva, and that the law firm is a front, always has been, a place to wash dirty money until it comes out clean.

He tells me about a man named Pyotr who ran the Bratva's laundering for twenty years, until he fled to Istanbul and left a mess behind that started drawing the wrong kind of attention.

He tells me somebody outside was starting to peek a little too close, and that when a machine that can find the story hidden inside ten thousand transactions is the only thing standing between you and a federal cell or a shallow grave, you go and get that machine by whatever means you have.

He tells me about his father. About glass thrown against walls. About a woman who made herself smaller and smaller until there was nothing left.

He tells me why he took the mirrors, and even though I already knew that part, hearing it now, wrapped inside all the rest, makes it uglier and sadder at the same time.

And then he tells me the last thing.

"The phone call you answered," he says, "of Navi telling me the deal was ready… you have to understand what you interrupted." His jaw grinds. "The morning before, I called him and told him to kill the whole thing. I decided I'd find another way, no matter what it cost."

I scoff. "You expect me to believe?—"