Chapter 22 - Logan #2
I lay it out. And I ask for her help directly. I need it.
Because the systems failed. Someone who knows how I think built a structure inside my structure, and it held for months while I audited everything around it and missed it.
"Money has been leaving our operating accounts for months," I say.
"Small amounts, carefully formatted, moving through shell companies with enough layers to survive routine audit.
The trail terminates at accounts connected to the Zayas family.
Andrei Cebotari was tracking it. Andrei died before he could close the thread.
The person who knew Andrei was close enough to warn them is still inside. "
Juliet has gone very still.
"We've been treating it as a financial leak," I continue. "But Andrei flagged a gem dealer three weeks ago — valuations that don't hold. I couldn't make it fit the accounting anomalies. That's where I need you."
Juliet sets down the mug.
"Can I see the transactions?"
I turn the secondary monitor toward her. She pulls it closer, leans in. Her fingers trace the columns without touching the screen. She goes quiet, focused.
I watch her work. Out of the corner of my eye, Wren is watching too — watching me, specifically.
Juliet flicks between windows. Pulls up the gem dealer's valuation history. She murmurs something to herself.
"There." She points. "This purchase. Appraised at eight hundred thousand. But this same stone grade — here, and here — in two other transactions from the same period, valued at five-fifty. And the sale four months later?" She scrolls. "Four-twenty."
I look at the numbers.
"You buy at inflated value," she says, "and sell below market.
The spread doesn't disappear — it moves.
Someone is laundering money through gem transactions.
Overpay on acquisition, underpay on sale, the difference surfaces clean somewhere else.
It's systematic." Her jaw tightens slightly.
"Andrei was tracking the accounting anomalies.
He didn't have the gem expertise to see the mechanism. But he was right. He was almost there."
The room is quiet.
She's found in forty minutes what Andrei was circling for weeks. Not because she's smarter than Andrei — because she speaks a language he didn't. The insider has been routing Zayas money through stones, hiding the flows in plain sight, and it took a girl who grew up around gem tables to see it.
"The dealer is part of it," she continues.
"Knowingly or not, they're processing these transactions.
If I can get the full ledger — every gem transaction over the last eighteen months — I can map the spread.
Find the pattern. It'll tell us when the laundering started, how often, and roughly what amounts we're looking for. "
"Which gives us a timeline," I say.
"Which narrows your list." She glances at me. "You already have a list, I presume?"
"Seven names."
She nods. "Give me the full ledger and two days."
By noon, Juliet has set up on the small table in the corner, studying the ledger and making handwritten notes.
She doesn't look up when Nico checks in.
She doesn't look up when someone knocks with an operations question that I handle in four sentences at the door, stepping into the hallway to deal with it rather than bringing another unfamiliar face into the room while Wren is resting.
Wren has her sketchbook now. She's sitting up against the pillows with the notebook propped on her bent knees, her left hand moving across the page in careful, deliberate strokes.
Slower than usual — I've watched her draw enough to know her natural speed.
She's teaching her left hand what her right hand knows. The tilt of her head is the same.
I look at the access logs.
The mole doesn't know Juliet is here. Doesn't know that the thread Andrei died following has been picked up by someone who reads gem transactions like a first language, who saw the laundering mechanism in under an hour.
Somewhere in this building, the insider is sitting with their access and their knowledge of how I think, still believing they're hidden.
They're not hidden anymore.
I sit back in the chair.
My eyes find Wren.
The sketchbook is lowered. She stopped drawing sometime in the last minute, and I didn't notice the pencil go still.
She's watching me instead. Not the ceiling, not the room, not Juliet bent over her calculations in the corner.
Me. Her gaze is direct and quiet, the same attention she gives everything: patient, complete.
I don't look away.
Neither does she.
The war room hums around us — the screens, the open ledger, the soft scratch of Juliet's pen, the distant pulse of the building beneath our feet. All of it continues.
Her, looking at me.
Me, looking back.
The word I couldn't say this morning is still there.
Still sitting in the center of my chest where it's been since the parking lot, since the ambulance, since the guilt arrived alongside everything else.
I don't say it now either. But she sees something in my face, and the corner of her mouth moves.
Small. Quiet. Just for me.
I go back to the access logs.
But the warmth stays.