37. Cali
CALI
I wake up with my cheek stuck to the kitchen island and a spreadsheet open on my screen. My neck is a solid bar of pain. There's a puddle of drool by the trackpad. Classy.
I don't remember falling asleep. I was just typing like a woman possessed, building columns and rows, writing code, laying out everything I knew about He Who Must Not Be Named.
And then, I guess, my body gave out on me, and I face-planted onto the counter.
I sit up slow. My back cracks like a glowstick. My eyes are gummy and swollen from crying. I feel like I got hit by a bus, and then the bus backed up and hit me again to make sure.
I need coffee. I need a shower. I need to remember how to be a human being. My children are depending on me for that much, at least.
So, summoning willpower from depths I never knew I possessed, I get the coffee going and then I drag myself up the stairs to the bathroom, one hand on the rail because my legs still feel like they belong to someone else.
I push open the bathroom door.
And I stop dead.
The mirror is back.
The big one, over the sink. It's back. Hung up. Perfectly level. Exactly where it used to be. Like it never left.
I stand there in the doorway and look at my own reflection for the first time in weeks. Kinda wish I hadn't, because I look terrible. Puffy face, mascara tracked down my cheeks in gray rivers, hair a rat's nest on one side from sleeping on the counter.
I get a sneaking suspicion that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Honestly, I don't even have to check the rest of the house—my gut is never wrong here.
But I do anyway, because I want to be sure.
I walk the hall, and yes, the hallway mirror is back.
The one by the front door is back. Down in the guest bathroom: back.
The little magnetic one is once again on the fridge, stuck right where it always was.
He returned them. Every single one. Sometime in the night, while I was passed out at my own kitchen island, someone snuck into my house and put the mirrors back.
Which means someone was in my house. Again.
Without permission.
Again.
Half of me wants to call the police. The other half wants to commit violence.
I'm burning up with a hot, ugly wave of rage, because I know exactly what this is supposed to be: some grand, sweeping, romantic gesture.
You should get to choose what you have and how you see yourself.
I can practically hear him saying it in that reverent purr, the one that I once believed was for me and me alone.
That voice was a lie.
The mirrors are a lie, too.
Every kind, thoughtful, perfect thing he ever did was nothing but a hideous lie.
I go back into the bathroom and glare at the mirror. As I do, I think about the man who took it, who stood in my bathroom in the dark and decided I didn't get to have a mirror, and then decided I did.
Both times it was about him. What he wanted. What he saw fit to do.
Well, guess what, Ronan Akov?
I don't want anything you've touched.
There's a heavy ceramic soap dispenser on the counter. I pick it up. I don't even think about it. I just hurl.
On impact, the mirror shatters. It falls off the hooks in a bright, loud crash, jagged pieces raining into the sink and onto the floor. My reflection breaks into a hundred wrong angles and then falls apart entirely.
I stand there breathing hard.
But dammit, that felt good.
"There," I gasp to nobody at all. "Now, I chose."
I don't clean it up. The pieces can sit there. I step around the glass, careful not to slice my bare feet to ribbons, and take stock of what's left on the wall. Just a few wimpy shards clinging to the frame.
Fine by me.
I scrape my hair back into a knot on top of my head, then splash cold water on my face from the tap, not looking at the broken glass littering the sink. Then I go back downstairs.
By the time I arrive, the coffee's ready. I pour a mug, sit back down at the island, and open my laptop.
There's work to be done.
There's something Ronan Akov doesn't know.
He locked me out of everything. The dashboard, the admin portal, the bank, the corporate filings, the data infrastructure.
Every login I have throws back Authentication failed or Access revoked or Haha, you wish.
They were thorough. Whoever did it—Navi, probably, or some faceless person on Ronan's payroll—they went down my whole list and snatched it all up good.
But there's one more item that isn't on any list.
When I first built the fraud engine, back before it had a name, before Emmett Glover ever blocked off twenty minutes for it, I spun up a founder's dev instance on a server I've been paying eleven dollars a month for out of a personal card.
It's where I broke things on purpose, testing ugly early versions before they were fit to show anyone.
It's not connected to the company's official infrastructure. Therefore, it's not in any of the formation documents, not attached to the LLC or the bank or anything Todd ever put his greedy little name on.
It's mine. Just mine.
Which means not one of Ronan's thieving little minions could've possibly known they left it behind.
I log in.
Welcome back, Calista.
I could weep tears of joy at those three little words, same as I've wept tears of joy at Ronan's four-word reminders every morning for the last few weeks. I don't, because I'm all out of tears I'm willing to spend on him.
But I could.
Just like I'd hoped, the engine's here. It's an older version, sure, but it works. It can still reach out and pull public records, court dockets, corporate filings, the same open data streams I've always fed it.
They took my house. They didn't take my hands.
Receipts are incoming. Round two.
I crack my knuckles and I start.
The first thing I go after is the filing. Weeks ago, Ronan looked at me over a table at the Woozy Tiger and blamed it on Todd. Time to see if that was really the truth.
I feed the engine what I have—the entity that filed it, the case number, the shell name buried in the paperwork.
Then I let it digest.
As I watch it work, the shell that filed against me unspools into another shell.
That one leads into another. Three layers of Delaware entities, each one owning a piece of the last, each one a blank corporate face with a registered agent and no human name attached.
My engine stalks the path patiently, one hop at a time, because that's what I built it to do.
And at the bottom, at the very bottom of the stack, is a client entity…
… of The Akov Firm.
I sit back.
So the filing that Ronan told me was Todd came from Ronan. It was his all along. The fire he rushed to put out was a fire he set himself.
But it gets worse. It always gets worse.
I pull the docket for that motion, the one he "defeated," the one he told me at the aquarium was handled, wouldn't survive the hearing on the twelfth. And there it is, right in the record.
The motion wasn't beaten—it was withdrawn. By consent. Meaning both sides agreed to drop it. And then, within forty-eight hours, a second shell refiled almost the exact same thing.
I read it twice to be sure I'm not imagining it.
But no. I'm not. It's very, very real.
The whole thing was bullshit theater. He came to me looking like the only man who could save me, then he "fought it off" by simply agreeing—with himself—to withdraw it, and then he quietly refiled through a different route so the acquisition kept building steam in the background while I sat across from him, thanking God he was on my side.
He wasn't.
Well, he kind of was.
But in reality, he was on both sides. He was the wolf at my throat and the shepherd with his hand on my shoulder telling me not to move, don't leave, trust me, I'll handle it.
This is amateur work, Ms. Meadows. I don't think we'll have an issue fighting back.
Ha! What a joke.
He wasn't fighting anybody. He was acting out every part in the play, and I was the audience, and I fucking clapped.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see sparks. My coffee's gone cold, but I don't get up for more.
Okay. Okay. This is bad. This is very bad. He wanted my company, so he built an elaborate, patient, months-long machine to take it from me while simultaneously making me fall in love with him.
And I did. I fell so hard it makes me want to be sick.
But I'm a data scientist. I don't stop at the story I expected to find. I keep pulling.
Because there's a question underneath all of it that I haven't answered yet.
Why?
Ronan Akov is a wealthy man. He owns two yachts, and a penthouse over Central Park, and a lake house upstate so perfectly idyllic that it made my children beg to live there. He runs a white shoe Manhattan law firm. His net worth must have just a sickening amount of commas.
It's pretty damn clear he isn't hurting for cash. He definitely didn't need my little data sciences company. On the scale of what a man like that has, my whole company doesn't even count as a rounding error.
So why go to all this trouble? Why steal a thing you don't need?
I don't have the answer. But I have his firm's public footprint, and I have a hunting dog made of zeroes and ones that never gets tired.
So I point that dog at The Akov Firm.
Lawyers are good by nature at cleaning up their tracks, but no one is perfect, not even Ronan, and some filings are mandatory. Traces of what they do and who they are show up like exhaust fumes in the public record. Invoices, stock reports, court documents, paperwork on paperwork on paperwork.
And if it's out there, my creation will find it.
I watch the little progress indicator crawl, hardly daring to breathe. It's almost a miracle how this thing has come to be used. A freakish accident, a bizarre twist of fate. I built it to catch supply-chain fraud. Now, for the second time, I'm using it to catch a liar.
The engine finishes.
I lean in to read—
And the blood goes out of my face.
The pattern it's found is not a lawyer stealing a startup. It's not a rich man collecting one more toy just for the sheer thrill of ripping it away from someone weaker than him, like I thought it would be.
The billing coming through The Akov Firm and its endless nest of shells is deep and meandering.
Payments route through business after business after business, six deep, seven deep, each one taking a little, passing it on, until money that started somewhere dirty comes out the other end looking like a dentist got reimbursed, a consultant got paid, a lawyer billed some hours.
It's all incredibly complex.
It's also fake.
This is money laundering of the highest order. Someone is taking dirty cash and making it look like clean, new dollar bills, hot off the presses.
Oh, God.
I can't say for sure where the money truly comes from. But I learned early in my auditing classes at college that, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.
So if it walks like a criminal organization and it quacks like a criminal organization…
… does that mean Ronan Akov is a criminal?
I don't know and I'm terrified to find out. But it's becoming more and more clear that whatever's happening at The Akov Firm is the kind of thing people don't just lose lawsuits over. It's the kind of thing people vanish over.
People like me.
Me, a thirty-four-year-old mother of two, sitting in my socks at my kitchen island, in a house with the mirrors broken and the coffee cold, staring at a spreadsheet that just told me the man I fell in love with is not a slightly-worse Todd in a better jacket.
He's something I don't have a word for.
I'm bad in ways you've never even imagined, he told me that first night at the bar. Ways that have nothing to do with lying to a woman or breaking her heart.
He was honest about that much, wasn't he? He warned me, straight up, to my face. And I laughed and called him a piece of shit and walked out into the cold.
If only I'd kept on walking.
Better yet, running.
Forever.
Not in any way you'd understand, he said, that day in his office, when I asked if the Bradshaws were just a revenue stream with two entrances. When he said that, I got scared, truly scared, for the first and only time.
I understand now, though. I understand exactly.
My hands are shaking on the keys. I make myself breathe. In for four, out for four, until my heartbeat calms somewhat. I need a clear head before I can decide what to do next.
The kids are at my mother's. Thank God for that, because I need to think. How can I decide what to do with this? I can't call the police. I don't even know what I'd say, I don't know how deep this goes or who's in it or whether—
There's a knock at the door.
Every muscle in my body locks up.
I'm not expecting anyone. It's not even nine yet. My mother had plans to take the kids to the zoo this morning. Nobody knocks on my door at this hour. Nobody…
Except the people who've already been inside my house, moving my things around, showing me they can reach anything, anyone, anytime.
Why does that phrase pop into my head now? Oh, that's right. Because I've heard it before.
You can reach anything. Anyone. Anytime you want. That's what Ronan made that man in the opera house say back to him. Mikhail—that was the frightened man's name. I saw Ronan terrorize him without lifting a finger. Saw it with my own eyes, and I still went back into the box and held his hand.
Knock-knock-knock.
I'm in motion, because who knows how much time I actually have?
Off the stool, into the kitchen, my hand closing around the handle of the big butcher's knife in the block by the stove.
It comes free with a soft, metallic hiss.
I hold it up in front of me, both hands, blade out, my heart thudding so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
If someone's coming through that door to make me disappear, I am not going quietly. I have two children who need their mother. I will fight. I will bite and scream and stab and claw.
I. Will. Fucking. Fight.
I creep down the hall toward the front door. The knife trembles in my grip no matter how much I try to hold it steadier. Through the frosted glass panel beside the door, there's a shape. A person. Man-sized. Standing on my stoop.
I get to the door. My hand is on the deadbolt. My other hand has the knife raised over my shoulder at the ready.
I turn the lock. I yank the door open, blade up, a battle cry already tearing out of my throat—
And then I stop.
Standing on my front steps, hollow-eyed and unshaven, in a wrinkled shirt that looks slept-in, is the last person on earth I expected.
The knife hangs in the air.
"… Todd?"