25. Elena
Elena
By the time the elevator reaches the lobby, I am still furious enough to feel it in my teeth.
The driver opens the rear door. "The penthouse, Ms. Markides?"
"My apartment."
He hesitates for perhaps half a second before nodding.
That shouldn't surprise me. Adrianos said I could come and go. He said nobody would prevent me from leaving or change my destination without my agreement. Apparently, unlike Dimitris Karras, the compromise survived longer than an afternoon.
I climb into the car and stare through the window as we pull away. Karras's body keeps appearing in my mind. Not the blood. Not the sound of the gunshot. Not even the moment he realized Adrianos intended to kill him.
His words.
There will be more. New instructions. New contacts. Yet Adrianos shot him.
I know what Adrianos is. I knew before I slept with him, before I started waking beside him, before I learned the particular silence that means he's angry and the almost invisible movement at the corner of his mouth that means he's trying not to smile. I have never confused him with a good man.
That's not why I'm angry.
I'm angry because for one foolish stretch of time, I thought we had become partners.
I found Karras. I reconstructed the transactions. I put nine years of financial movements in front of him and dismantled every lie he tried to hide behind. Then the moment my judgment differed from Adrianos's, mine stopped mattering.
The car turns onto my street, and I close my eyes. Apparently, betrayal doesn't always require a lie. Sometimes it only requires discovering that your seat at the table was conditional.
My apartment feels smaller than I remember.
Nothing has changed except that several important files are missing because a certain Greek tyrant relocated them without permission.
My plants are alive, which means either I'm better at remembering to water them than Adrianos believes or one of his security men has secretly developed an interest in horticulture.
I lock the door, set my laptop on the dining table, and open the curtains.
Then I work.
Numbers don't have guns. Numbers don't decide they've heard enough and put a bullet into the only source you've managed to capture alive. Numbers don't look at you across a bed until you forget all the reasons allowing them close is a terrible idea.
Kalliopi used to say people lie, but numbers get nervous.
The first time she said it, I'd laughed.
"Numbers don't have emotions."
"Exactly," she'd replied. "So when they start behaving strangely, blame the person touching them."
I can hear her voice so clearly that my throat tightens.
"All right, Kalliopi."
I open Karras's accounts.
"Let's make them nervous."
Before he died, Karras gave us three terminal locations, access codes, shell companies, server addresses and the names of intermediaries he claimed never to have met twice. Adrianos believed we'd emptied him.
Maybe he's right.
The thought irritates me enough that I immediately reject it, then irritates me again because rejecting a conclusion simply because Adrianos reached it first is exactly the kind of intellectual dishonesty I despise.
So I remove Karras from the equation. If the man is dead, interrogate his money.
I start with access records.
Karras's credentials appear across hundreds of transactions, but credentials aren't people. Anyone with sufficient access could use them. I need to know when Karras himself could reasonably have initiated the movements.
I build a timeline.
Travel dates. Board meetings. Medical leave. Public appearances. Banking activity. Terminal access.
Then I place the OB6 movements beside it.
For the first hour, nothing changes. For the second, I find three inconsistencies. At 6:42 p.m. on a Thursday two years ago, funds moved from an Asterion-linked settlement vehicle into one of the intermediary structures. Karras's terminal is inactive.
That proves nothing.
It could be an automated transaction. Delegated authorization. Delayed settlement. I only flag it and continue. Another appears eight months later. Then another. By the fifth, I stop. Karras wasn't logged into any registered terminal when these transfers occurred.
I pull the shell companies he admitted creating and compare their incorporation dates against the earliest reservoir movements.
My pulse changes.
One of the companies feeding the network predates Karras's first involvement by six years. Another by four.
"Well."
I sit back. This isn't proof he was unimportant. It is proof he wasn't first. I automatically reach for the coffee beside me, take a sip, and grimace because it has gone cold.
I look toward the other side of the table. Empty. The irritation that moves through me is absurdly disproportionate. At Adrianos's penthouse, my coffee never gets cold anymore. And I don't even know when that started.
Sometimes he replaces it himself. Sometimes someone on his staff does. Once, I accused him of monitoring my caffeine consumption, and he informed me that I'd become unpleasant enough without dehydration contributing to the problem.
I look back at the empty chair. There is no Adrianos asking why a transaction matters. No Adrianos identifying the family behind an obscure company because apparently the man carries decades of criminal corporate structures in his head.
No quiet ‘show me’ when I find something.
This is what I wanted. The silence of my apartment. My decisions. So why does working alone suddenly feel wrong?
I turn back to the computer before my brain can answer. Twenty minutes later, I catch myself preparing to say, "Look at this."
But there's no one else here. I close my eyes.
"This is pathetic."
The security officer outside my apartment does not answer.
Good man.
Three hours later, somebody knocks. I know who it is before I reach the door, and that annoys me too. But I check anyway. Adrianos stands alone in the hallway. His security remains somewhere out of sight, because apparently he's capable of learning.
I open the door but don't invite him in. He stares at me, and I return the favor.
"You found me," I say.
"I knew where you were."
"That sounded disturbingly sinister."
"I meant the security told me."
"Not better."
His gaze moves over my face. "Can I come in?"
The question catches me off guard. Adrianos doesn't ask permission.
I step aside.
He enters and closes the door behind him. No kiss. No attempt to touch me. He removes his jacket and places it over the back of a chair as naturally as if he's done it a hundred times.
I hate how familiar the movement feels. His attention lands on my coffee.
"You've been drinking that?"
"Don't."
His gaze returns to me. "Don't what?"
"Come in here and behave as if nothing happened."
His expression hardens slightly. "I'm not."
"Good."
Silence settles between us. He doesn't rush to fill it. Neither do I.
Finally, Adrianos looks toward my laptop. "Have you found something?"
I laugh without humor. "You don't get to do that."
"Do what?"
"Walk in here and skip straight to the investigation because it's easier than talking about Karras."
"I'm not avoiding Karras."
"You shot him."
"I'm aware."
"He was alive, Adrianos. He was talking."
"He had given us everything he knew."
"You believed he'd given us everything."
"Yes."
"And therefore that became fact?"
His jaw shifts. "No."
That stops me.
I cross my arms. "Do you regret killing him?"
"No."
At least he doesn't hesitate.
The honesty hurts more than an apology I wouldn't believe.
"If I had the same information," he says, "and had to make the decision again, I would probably make the same one."
I look away.
"I appreciate the honesty."
"You don't sound appreciative."
"I also hate the answer."
"I know."
I turn back to him. "Do you know what actually made me leave?"
"Karras."
"No. You."
Something changes in his face.
"I know you kill people. I'm not going to stand here pretending I suddenly discovered that after climbing into your bed. The problem is that I thought we were doing this together."
"We are."
"Until I disagree with you."
His brows draw together.
"I found Karras," I continue. "I found the fee. I reconstructed the transactions. You trusted me to question him because you knew I could get answers from him. But the second I said we weren't finished and you decided we were, suddenly there was no partnership."
"He reported Kalliopi."
"And I hated him for it."
"He helped get her killed."
"I know!"
My voice rises, and I force it down again.
"This isn't about whether he deserved to die. Maybe he did. It's about whether killing him at that exact moment helped us. I believed it didn't. You didn't even consider that long enough to let me finish."
Adrianos watches me quietly.
"You follow violence to conclusions," I say. "That's what you understand. Threat appears, you eliminate it. Problem ends."
"Sometimes it does."
"And sometimes uncertainty contains information."
"Sometimes uncertainty gets people killed."
There it is. Not arrogance. Fear wearing armor.
I exhale. "I understand why you think that way."
"Do you?"
"Yes. More than you think."
He looks away first.
I soften my voice, but not the point. "I'm not asking you to become someone else. I know who you are, Adrianos. I don't need you pretending you're a good man because I'm sleeping with you."
His gaze returns to mine.
"But I can't become you either. I can't start treating every unanswered question like something that needs a bullet. I can't stop caring about how we reach the truth because your methods are faster."
"I've never asked you to become me."
"Not deliberately."
His expression changes, and I step closer.
"But if this is going to be anything, I need to remain myself inside it. Loving you cannot require becoming you."
The words leave my mouth before I can stop them, and everything goes silent. My heart gives one violent beat.
Loving.
Not wanting. Not caring. Not falling.
Loving.
Adrianos doesn't move. Neither do I. His eyes hold mine with an intensity that makes the room suddenly feel much too small.
"Is that what you're doing?" he asks quietly.
I could lie. I could tell him I misspoke. I could turn the sentence into something theoretical and hide behind grammar until we're both exhausted.
Instead, I lift my chin.
"That's not the part of that sentence you should be worried about."
Something moves across his face. Not amusement. Something far more dangerous.
"It's the only part I heard."
My breath catches. Thankfully, a sound from my laptop cuts through the room. I turn too quickly, and an alert flashes across the screen.
Saved query match.
For one second, I simply stare at it. Then the numbers register.
"No fucking way."
Adrianos is beside me immediately, but he doesn't reach for the laptop.
"What?"
I sit and open the transaction. One of the intermediary accounts Karras identified has moved funds.
Two point eight million euros.
I check the timestamp, and my stomach drops.
"What time did you kill Karras?"
Adrianos gives me the time. I calculate the difference.
Forty-three minutes.
"This happened afterward."
His expression changes as I open the routing details.
The money originated through a shell structure Karras never mentioned, passed through two settlement vehicles, and landed inside one of the liquid reserve accounts.
Adrianos leans closer. "Could he have scheduled it?"
"Possibly."
I search the authorization data. No Karras credentials. No Asterion terminal. Nothing connecting him to the initiation.
I pull up the anomalies I found earlier.
"Look."
I show him the transaction from two years ago. Then another. And another.
"These movements happened when Karras wasn't logged in. This company existed before he became involved. So did this account."
Adrianos studies the screen. He doesn't tell me what it means.
He asks, "What do you think?"
I look at him.
The question shouldn't matter, but it does, because after everything we've just said, he is deliberately asking for my judgment.
I turn back to the data.
"I think we misunderstood Karras."
"How?"
"He wasn't controlling the network."
I bring up the timeline.
"Look at the redundancies. Different companies. Different access points. Some routes overlap with him; others don't. He wasn't the structure. He was inside it."
"A participant."
"A replaceable participant."
I trace the newest transaction farther. The network didn't pause when Karras died. It simply kept moving.
I sit back slowly. Adrianos's expression darkens as he reaches the same conclusion. I turn the monitor toward him and tap the timestamp.
"That moved forty-three minutes after you killed him."
His eyes remain fixed on the screen. I should resist voicing my thought, but I don't.
"Congratulations. You executed middle management."
His jaw tightens. Normally, I might enjoy that, but tonight I do not.
Karras being less important than we thought does not make me right.
It makes the situation worse. Someone else can trigger the transfers.
Someone else controls the intermediaries.
Someone else knows the network well enough that the death of a man who served the Crown for decades does not even cause a delay.
Karras was not the architect. He was a cog, and the machine is still running.
Adrianos straightens beside me, close enough that I can feel the heat of him without either of us touching. Our argument isn't resolved. I'm still angry. He's still the man who would probably make the same terrible decision again. And I'm still the woman who will fight him when he does.
But when I look at him, I can no longer hide behind attraction, proximity, or shared danger. The truth is much simpler. Much worse.
I love him.
I love a man whose instincts sometimes terrify me. A man I refuse to become. A man I may spend half my life arguing with if we survive long enough to have one.
I don't tell him.
Not yet. Instead, I turn back to the screen where another tiny movement joins a reservoir worth hundreds of millions.
Karras is dead, but the money is still moving. And somewhere above him, someone is still giving orders.