15. Ronan
RONAN
She was afraid of me.
For a moment there, as I stood looking out the window and she threw that barb at my back, she thought she'd gone too far and that I was about to snap.
I've been called worse. By men with knives and men with badges. Hell, by my own father in the last coherent hour of his life. None of it stung the way that did, flung from her mouth in that tight little voice, her chin up and her spine straight even though I could smell the fear coming off her.
She's right to be fearful. That's the sane response to what I am, and Cali Bradshaw is many maddening things but she is not, thank God, stupid.
And still. It sat wrong in my chest.
I turn back to the window.
The Hudson is gray sludge forty stories below.
Barges crawl south and a helicopter zooms across the sky toward Jersey.
I look at it all for a while and let the thoughts in my head settle down until it's the usual calm, focused silence.
Whiskey is a faster way to dull the noise, but it's too early for that, even by my standards.
What an interesting creature she's turning out to be. She snagged my attention early on, but the extent to which I'm finding myself fixating on her is a surprise. She thinks she's too much. That she used to be bold, but Todd snuffed it out of her.
That's laughable. Used to be? I want to grab her by the waist and tell her, Ms. Meadows, you just hurled insults at the leader of the most powerful criminal organization in New York City. "Bold" doesn't even begin to cover it.
She's still got her fire.
She just needs to be reminded precisely how hot it can get.
The door opens without a knock, which means it's the one person in this building who's never once knocked in his life.
"Ruh-roh. You look like someone canceled Christmas.
" Navi ambles in, hands in the pockets of his suit.
He drops into one of the torture chairs across from my desk, throws a leg over the arm, and grins at me.
"Or like you got dumped. Did you get dumped, Ro? Is that what this face is?"
"No, cousin, that's just how my face looks."
"No, no, no. This is one you save for special occasions." He taps a faux-thoughtful finger against his pursed lips. "Could this possibly have anything to do with the ravishing woman I passed coming out of the elevator?"
"Navi, are you familiar with the phrase, 'Shut the fuck up'?"
"If I had a nickel, I sure as hell wouldn't be working for you." He waves a lazy hand. "This is a fun turn of events. Who is she?"
I drop down behind my desk and grimace. "The woman is not on today's agenda."
"See, that's how I know she's the whole agenda."
I glare at my cousin. He's an idiot, a fact I remind him of constantly, but unfortunately, he's also the only family I have left and the only person left on this earth I give a damn about.
The other thing he is is relentless. He never stops. Come hell or high water, come an alien invasion or the nuclear apocalypse, he just keeps going.
So I do the only thing that works on Navi.
I give him the truth. A small one, anyway.
"Her name is Calista Bradshaw. Her husband came to me looking to gut her in the divorce."
Navi's grin flickers. "And?"
"And I took his retainer, sat on his case, and before I could tell him he was a worthless piece of shit, she told him herself."
Navi lets out a low whistle. "Be still my heart."
"She's asked me to be her lawyer."
"Naturally, you said no."
"Naturally."
He studies me carefully, the leg over the armrest going still. "But you didn't send her packing, did you, Ro?"
"That's all you're getting for today, you fucking hyena. We have actual work to do."
He grins, but he's satisfied enough with the morsel I tossed him to let it go for the time being. "Fire away then, boss."
"The Pyotr issue does not look good for us."
His grin fades a notch. Not all the way—it never comes down entirely. But it thins into the shape it takes when we've crossed from teasing into the real deal.
"Yeah," he says. "We do. That's actually why I came up, before I got distracted by your tragic little heartbroken face." He swings his leg off the arm of the chair and sits up properly, forearms on his knees. "It's bad, cousin. Worse than bad."
"He left the country?"
"Thursday," confirms Navi. "Aeroflot to Istanbul, then who knows.
He did what you told him, credit where it's due.
He didn't call, didn't linger, didn't try to skim on the way out the door.
" He rubs a hand over his jaw. "But Ro, he was the whole machine.
Without him, things are already starting to get a little loopy. "
I had hoped, when I first learned about Pyotr's attempted disappearing act, that the stopgap measures we'd put in place would be enough to keep things running until we'd fully transitioned to a post-Pyotr era.
Seems like I was wrong.
"The main issue," Navi continues, "is that Pyotr didn't do a very good job of actually telling his replacements how things worked.
The man had a system in his head that nobody else could see.
He'd move a payment through six businesses in a night and it'd come out the other side looking like a dentist in Queens got reimbursed for a conference in Tampa.
" He leans back. "The books look clean because he made them look clean.
Manually. Every week. He was the one keeping the seams from showing. "
"So now, shit is falling apart."
"Not yet. But it's going to." He hands me a tablet with a spreadsheet pulled up on the screen. "That's the problem I found this morning. Look at the second column."
I pick it up and scroll. It's a standard ledger, tallying debits and credits for a dozen-plus front businesses that conceal the Bratva's real source of income.
But running down the second column is a series of small discrepancies lit up in angry red.
A payment that arrived two days late, an invoice logged twice, a transfer that went out to the wrong shell and had to be quietly walked back.
None of them are large. But if we keep making mistakes like this, someone is bound to notice sooner or later.
My cousin seems to have reached the same conclusion. "Give a smart forensic accountant a month and a subpoena, and every one of those little hiccups starts to point in one direction."
"Toward the guns," I say grimly.
Navi nods. “Bingo.”
Without meaning to, both of us have fallen back into whispers. Neither of us likes to air our dirt out loud in this building, even in this room, with the soundproofed glass and the twice-daily bug sweep and the assurances that nobody is listening.
"The firm can wash the money," he says. "But it's not enough. A trickle? Yeah, sure, no problem. These guns aren't a trickle, Ro. Give it a few more weeks and they'll be a fucking fire hose. The only thing worse than no money is too much of it. That's the issue we're dealing with right now."
I set the tablet down and think. "How long do we have?"
"Before it becomes traceable?" Navi considers. "If nobody's actively looking right this second, maybe a few months. If somebody starts looking—a federal somebody, a rival somebody, or even just a curious somebody—" He shrugs. "Weeks. Maybe less. It depends on how good they are."
I lean back in my chair, lace my fingers over my stomach, and stare at the ceiling.
What I need is not a new Pyotr. His departure, as unwelcome as it was, is kind of a gift. It's shown me that I can't allow my empire to depend on one man.
Men are weak. They have families and sicknesses and they get wanderlust at the worst possible moments.
What I need is a machine that can look at ten thousand small, boring, disconnected transactions and find the story hidden inside them before anyone else does.
What I need is to run my own books through something colder and faster than Pyotr's failing heart, find the seams before the feds do, and stitch them shut.
What I need, in other words, just walked out of my office a few short minutes ago.
I already knew this. But I've been lying to myself about all the reasons I keep pursuing Calista Meadows. No matter how much I intend not to repeat my father's mistakes and end up as a man buried by his own selfish lies, I find myself trudging down the same path that killed him.
"Navi," I say. "You passed our answer in the elevator."
He blinks at the unexpected turn. "The girl?"
"Her company builds predictive analytics. Fraud detection." I sit up. "She built an engine that takes disconnected data and finds the pattern inside it. She used it to catch her husband cheating on her."
Navi's leg comes off the arm of the chair. He's not smiling anymore. "You want to hire her?" he guesses slowly. "A civilian? Ro, I dunno…"
I shake my head. "I can't hire her."
"But you just said—"
"No. Hiring her isn't an option. She doesn't know what we are, and I have no intention of telling her. Nor do I have any intention of letting her close enough to uncover the clues herself."
He throws up his hands, exasperated. "Then what's the point?"
"If I can't hire the tool," I say slowly, "then I'll simply acquire it instead."
When he understands what I'm saying, his jaw drops. "You're going to take her company?"
I pull the tablet back toward me, but I don't look at it.
I'm looking at nothing. "It's already vulnerable.
Her ex made sure of that. He listed himself as registered agent and officer on the formation documents.
On paper, the ownership of that company is a beautiful mess.
All we have to do is insert ourselves into the mix. "
Navi is pouting. "What happened to all these ethical concerns about being her lawyer? Your morals won't let you represent her in a divorce from her dirtbag ex, but stealing her life's work is perfectly fine?"
"I'm not stealing. We're simply… borrowing."
"Yeah," he agrees with obvious sarcasm. "Permanently. You're not exactly the Good Guy of the Year here, cousin."
I don't answer right away, because he isn't wrong.
But what I don't intend to tell him is that I'm sick of looking for any reason to keep her close. I gave her that napkin as a way out, even though I hoped she wouldn't use it. But she's been teetering on the line of throwing it in my face and telling me to fuck off ever since.
Her insulting me, accusing me of looking at her and seeing dollar signs? She was wrong about that. For too long now, I've looked at her and seen a ton of shit I have no business seeing. So forcing myself to see dollar signs when I look at Calista Meadows makes way more sense.
She's just business. Nothing more, nothing less.
Business is clean. Business I can handle. Business is just supply chain issues, fraud and compliance, the sort of thing that spreadsheets and data analytics were designed to handle cleanly.
If I let her be anything more than that… trouble will follow.
"I'm taking the tool because it's the only thing standing between this organization and a federal indictment. Between you and me and a prison cell, cousin."
"What happens to her?" he protests.
"She keeps the house. She keeps the kids.
She keeps every cent Todd tried to steal—more, if I have anything to say about it.
" I lean forward. "The company is all she loses.
And it was never really going to be hers anyway, not with the knots Todd tied himself up in.
I'm only making sure it lands in the right hands. "
My hands, to be specific.
Navi holds my gaze for a long, long moment. Then he sighs and rubs his face and looks, suddenly, tired in a way that has nothing to do with Pyotr.
"You know what your problem is, Ro?"
"Enlighten me."
"You're smart enough to build a cage that looks exactly like a favor.
" He stands, straightens his jacket, and slouches for the door.
At the threshold, he lingers. "But when it comes apart—and it will, mark my words—don't be surprised when she can't tell the difference between you and Todd.
Because from where she'll be standing, there won't be one. "
With that, he disappears.
I sit alone in the quiet for a while. Then I pull the keyboard toward me and open a fresh document, and I begin, very quietly, to draft the first motion—a request, filed on behalf of a shell that will never be traced back to me, to intervene in the matter of the ownership dispute surrounding a certain Delaware LLC and its founder's interest.
My apologies, Ms. Meadows, I say in my head in a cold, dead voice. It's simply business.