Page 27 of Mane in Finance

"Lie to him," Kian says.

"Yes, he cannot walk away, his greed physically won't let him." She pulls up a blank transaction template, the bones of the fake she's about to build. "He's sitting on a database he can't crack fast and can't sell until he can prove it's genuine. That's his problem right now. He has the most valuable file and no way to turn it into money before someone catches him. So we give him a buyer. Not a small one. A consortium, multiple parties, pooling funds, desperate, impatient, willing to pay for the database unseen if the price is astronomical enough to feel real."

Kurtis sets his coffee down. "And he bites because…"

"Because I'll make the money look substantial." Her eyes have that hard light I've stopped being able to look away from. "Escrow accounts funding up. Wire fragments assembling. Legal shells spinning into place, all visible through exactly the channels he is monitoring. He'll see a hundred and forty million dollars gathering itself for a single purchase, and he'll see it the exact same way he's seen the money before, as his. He won't be able to stand the thought of that money going to anyone else."

"There's a flaw," Hector says, because it's his job to find them. "He's careful. He'll verify. A story that good invites scrutiny."

"I'm counting on the scrutiny." Sophie doesn't blink. "A trap he can't inspect looks like a trap. It's better if he does inspect it. Every thread he pulls has to hold, has to lead somewhere real, has to reward the pulling. That's why it takes me days instead of hours. I'm not building a story. I'm creating a world, and when he audits it every number he checks will check out, because I know how he verifies these things. It's been long enough, I've learned his tactics, now I'll forge it around them."

Hector's the one who has to deliver it, and he takes the assignment with grim relish because he's wanted a swing at Clifford for weeks.

"The misinformation only works if it arrives where he expects it," Sophie tells him. "Not planted somewhere obvious. Seeded. He must believe his channels are still secure and his. The internal treasury feeds. The escrow monitoring service he set up himself. The back-channel broker line he thinks nobody else knows about." She hands him a list. "You've got the access. You insert the pieces slow, over days, out of order, like real money genuinely assembling."

Hector scans the list, and his scarred face eases into the closest thing he has to a smile. "You want me to spend three days lying to a computer."

"Three days." She holds his gaze. "You've wanted a crack at him, Hector. I'm asking you to be good for seventy-two hours and use this as the crack."

Sophie laughs, a real one, and the sound of it in this grim room does something to the whole temperature of the day.

It takes exactly three days as she said, and I pull every allied pride, pack, and clan into position without a single one of them tipping the board.

From the overlook, I make the calls, certain no listening device Clifford or the syndicate owns can reach. The coastal Alpha commits her people. The northern one sends fifty fighters and a note telling me only for the families. Kian's wolves and Kurtis' bears are in serious attire, ready to fight.

On the third night Sophie finds me on the terrace and tells me it's done.

"He took the bait," she says. Her voice is quiet, but there's steel running through it. "An hour ago. He accessed the escrow feed, verified the consortium three separate ways, and every check held. Then he did exactly what I predicted." She swivels around to me. "He scheduled the sale, named a date. He thinks he's about to become the richest man ever by handing over a file, to buyers who don't exist, at a place I'm going to choose."

I take her face in my hands, careful of the cheek that's nearly healed now.

"Two years I've thrown lions at this problem. You threw a spreadsheet together, and he walked into it thanking you." I say.

"I beat him with what he loves." She leans into my hands. "Money, that's what takes down a greedy man. Not force. You dangle their most wanted thing, more than his own safety, and he creates his own disaster. It's far from over. A trap's just a promise. Someone still has to be standing in the room when it closes, and that someone is going to be me."

"We'll talk about that part."

"We'll talk. You won't win." But she says it gently, and she doesn't pull away. "For now, it's happening, Lucian. Every buyer, every commander, the whole rotten top of it, all will hopefully gather in one place." She almost smiles. "Now we just have to let it unfold."

Down in the valley, the town sleeps on, unknowing, safe for one more night. And two hundred miles away a careful man is counting money that was never real, feeling like the smartest person alive.

23

SOPHIE

The place picks itself the morning after Clifford schedules the sale. Kurtis brings me the candidates over breakfast, three dead properties his construction company knows down to the rebar. I dismiss the first two inside a minute. A warehouse near the interstate has one road in and one out, too clean, too obviously a killbox, Clifford would smell it. A grain terminal by the river sits open on every side with no cover for a mile, no way to move fighters close without being seen. The third is the one I circle twice in red.

"This," I tell Lucian, sliding the blueprint toward him. "An abandoned fertilizer complex, twenty minutes north. Bankrupt a decade, never torn down. Three separate approaches, a rail spur, loading bays on two faces of the main building." I tap each one. "Clifford'll look at it and see exactly what a paranoid buyer wants, multiple ways out if the deal goes bad. What he won't see is that every one of those approaches is thick enough cover for us to walk right up to the walls without a single mercenary clocking them. It reads as safe to him. It's a funnel for us."

Kurtis leans over my shoulder and grunts approval. "My crew poured that foundation in '09. I know where every blind corner is. I can put bears inside the shell before dawn and you'd never know they were there."

"Exactly," I say. "He inspects the geography, it passes. He never imagines it's a trap."

By nightfall the fertilizer plant has a financial life it never had when it was actually operating. I build it string by string, all pointing to that one address. The consortium's escrow reroutes toward an account tied to the complex. Utility orders post to the county, power, water, the industrial hookups a buyer would need to verify a database on-site. Security contract appears in the filings, along with all the other pieces that link a multi million dollar company to it.

"You're building him somewhere to believe in," Lucian says, watching the records populate.

"Yep, it's a good trick. A world he can audit feels like truth." I lock the last shell into place. "He's going to pull everything on this location before he commits, and I need every single one to hold in his hands."