12. Silas
In the morning, I’m in the bedroom, looking out the windows that face La Condesa, the neighborhood where my city apartment sits.
Part of why I chose this location is the quiet and the green, along with the fact that it’s one of the safest and most affluent areas in the city.
A regular math professor could never afford a penthouse here. Someone who launders money for various organizations, on the other hand, can.
I figured out early enough that talent means nothing if you don’t know how to use it, and academia will never fully compensate for what I can do with numbers.
The first time I manipulated a company’s books, I was fourteen, and my brother Dean was the one who introduced me to that world.
With a father who valued his vodka bottle more than whether we had food on the table or electricity in the house, Dean had essentially been taking care of me on his own since our mother died when I was ten.
Seven years older than me, he always made sure I had clean clothes for school, pocket money for a sandwich, and the internet bill paid.
I didn’t know how he managed any of it until I was fourteen, when my talent for numbers had already become impossible to ignore, and he sat me down with a company’s financials and told me what they needed.
After three online courses covering basic accounting principles and a few hours spent reading through tax law, I managed to save that company $26,009 in taxes.
That was the moment I understood what I wanted to do, but Dean was dead set against me dropping out of school for a part-time gig like this. So he proposed a deal: one case a month, and everything else had to go toward passing my exams and getting into a top university.
“You don’t quit school, you don’t quit learning, because that’s the moment you lose yourself, Silas,” he said to me over and over again.
The memory of him puts a knot in my throat because I am responsible for his death. And no matter how deep I bury myself in equations and complex systems, I don’t have a magic eraser for the blood on my hands.
These days I only take large cases, organizations that need to make millions disappear, from which I take a twenty-two percent commission.
Enormous by any standard in this field, but the people who end up coming to me usually do so because everyone else was too afraid to get involved.
I’m not. I don’t understand what there is to be afraid of when you know every formula, every theory, and every tweak in the tax system you’re working with. But other people’s fear has been my income stream for years.
I walk into the living room and turn on the ambient lights then pull an Oberon beer from the fridge. Dean’s favorite.
I still remember how horrified he was when I told him how much I’d paid for a case, but compared to what we had growing up, it was the equivalent of a decent whisky.
I have exams to grade and I don’t like putting that off, so I settle into the armchair with a red pen and start reading.
At the fifth paper I stop.
Amalia Sanchez.
A smile pulls at my mouth because there’s something about this girl that makes my pulse pick up, and I still haven’t figured out what it is.
She’s not my most conventionally attractive student. She’s not charismatic in the traditional sense of the word, but she is the most interesting presence on the entire campus, and that is officially a problem.
I can’t stop watching her, which is how I ended up at the back of the operating systems lecture hall.
When I saw Javier touching her hair and pulling out her clips, I saw red, and I shouldn’t have.
All I know is that if I find out he so much as glanced in her direction again, he’ll be missing his entire hand before the semester’s out.
Violence isn’t my thing. That’s Andreas’s department. But years of tracking a monster have made me want to hold my own in a real fight. Blood and danger aren’t foreign to me, not given the organizations I work for.
But when I watched the fire in her eyes go out the moment he threatened her final grade, for a fraction of a second — an important fraction — I forgot that protecting her is not my role. Stepping in is not my role.
Especially since the professor-student cliché is not something I do. She’s not mine. But I can’t deny the way my blood runs hot at the memory of her in that dingy club, pressed close to another one of my students.
Another mistake.
I’d been waiting on some spreadsheets from one of the organizations I work for, and I decided to get a drink at one of the clubs near campus.
I always find a corner where you can’t make out my face unless you’re standing right in front of me, but I felt her presence the moment she walked through the door.
She polluted the room with that floral scent and that goddamn energy she carries around, the kind that makes you want to stare whether you have a reason to or not.
When she started dancing to NSYNC, I couldn’t have looked away if I’d tried.
She’s so colorful and yet so shy all at once. She has that bun that makes me wonder what it would feel like to thread my fingers through her hair. She has a full, round mouth with lips that are just slightly fuller than they should be, and they pull my eyes toward them every single time.
And what’s worst of all is the impulsiveness I can’t control when she’s around.
I always calculate my words and my actions. Always. I have never once broken that rule, but with her, there are already multiple instances where I’ve slipped.
When Gabriel moved in toward her with every intention of finding out what her lips taste like, my hand went straight to the fire alarm on its own.
All I know is that my mind stopped functioning, and I wanted to punish her for letting someone else get that close to her skin. For letting someone else breathe the air within her radius.
Two instances, Silas. Two instances where reason didn’t speak loudly enough.
I go through her exam and stop with my pen suspended in the air when I find nothing to correct.
What the hell?
I frown at the pages in front of me, and if I could breathe fire right now, I would.
Nobody gets everything right on my exams. Nobody.
Everyone misses a theorem, a problem, a formula, but of fucking course not her.
My hand has a faint tremor when I write the perfect score. Without meaning to, a smile spreads across my face when I think about her Cantor and Euclid remark.
Right. I’m sure they’d both be rolling in their graves if they knew what’s going through my head right now because of a girl with deer-in-the-headlights eyes and blouses in colors that are objectively too loud for my taste.
And yet the thought of seeing her in something black, something plain, makes me frown all over again.
What is wrong with me?
My interest in women is purely physiological, no relationships, no complications. And yet my mind is occupied by her to a degree that is becoming genuinely concerning.
After finishing the last of the grading, I decide to turn my attention to one of the projects that actually generates real money.
Inferno is a nightclub in Seattle that specializes in underground poker nights and a range of extracurricular services involving every woman who dances there each evening.
The volume of money being laundered through that club would make even a billionaire raise an eyebrow. I genuinely find it fascinating that some people will throw a hundred thousand dollars at a night with a particular woman, or buy into a poker game with a quarter million as the entry fee.
The last part I can almost understand. Having grown up without money, the idea of throwing it away on a single hand seems absurd to me even though, at this point, the way I count cards, I could walk out of one night with millions.
Years of dealing with people who consider themselves my superiors have taught me to keep my face unreadable. I’m the perfect picture of a calm intellectual. You can insult me, you can fall apart in front of me, and I won’t move a centimeter.
As for intimacy, I’ve never had to work for it. By most conventional standards I’m considered attractive, and more often than not I’m the one receiving the offers.
I have two women who always pick up when I call, and it would be so easy to forget the chaos in my head for a couple of hours. But something tells me they’re too composed, too polished, and too hollow compared to what my mind actually wants right now.
I push the thought aside because the last thing I need is to invite scrutiny into my life, and that’s exactly what would happen if a scandal around my integrity got started.
Like any problem I haven’t yet cracked, Amalia Sanchez has a solution I haven’t found. And once I figure out what makes her so relentlessly interesting to my mind, the fascination will dissolve and some other, more compelling unknown will appear on the horizon.
My phone buzzes with a message from Andreas, and when I check the screen, I find an address.
He’s the tech genius between the two of us, and when I need to find someone, I can count on him to move fast. Not always, a voice in my head says, but I know as well as anyone that some things can’t be forced.
It takes me thirty-five minutes to reach Carlos’s apartment. He runs the floor at one of the venues where I occasionally play poker.
I play rarely, always for high stakes, specifically to quiet the part of my mind that sometimes reminds me that I could know every theory and every formula in existence and still not have been able to save my brother when it mattered.
Carlos opens the door almost instantly, probably without checking the peephole, and when his eyes settle on my face, he takes two steps back.
“Hey, Charly. Nice place,” I say, letting the door close behind me. “For someone who theoretically brings home just over five hundred dollars a month, being able to afford this neighborhood and marble floors is either extraordinary luck or magic.”
Magic in the sense that he’s been skimming from players’ winnings and counting on nobody noticing a few thousand dollars short.
Most people don’t notice, writing it off as standard casino fees. I’m not most people. I know my percentages. I know my numbers.
“Se?or Silas, what’s going on...”
“I hate being taken for a fool, Charly. So I’ll give you two options: you return every cent you held back last week, or your wife finds out about Diandra and every gift bought for her on the credit card.”
He knows I’m not joking. My tone doesn’t leave room for negotiation, but I can already read from his face that there’s no real choice here because he’s already spent the money.
“You burned through seven thousand five hundred and ninety dollars in under a week? Diandra must be very happy right now.”
“Se?or Silas, I’ll get it back, se lo juro.”
Except he has no way of getting it back, which is exactly why he does what he does at the casino.
“That’s a shame. A real shame.”
One tap on my phone and the photos are sent to his wife. I watch the color drain from his face in real time.
Then I hit him. Once, clean, the back of his head connecting with the wall hard enough to rattle the frame hanging beside it. Not out of anger. Just to make sure he remembers this conversation every time he sees me walk into that casino.
“Ay, Diosito Santo,” he whimpers, sliding down slightly before catching himself.
There was a time when watching a grown man break down over something I caused might have moved me. Now all I feel is a wide, hollow nothing.
“Next time you see me at that casino, Carlitos, you make sure my count is right, unless you want your boss to hear about what you’ve been pulling. And we both know that doesn’t end with a text to your wife. It ends with broken bones.”
He just nods, eyes wet, gaze not quite meeting mine.
Before I walk out, something near the door catches my eye. A small cluster of hair elastics on the side table, the kind with little flowers in different colors, some of them with tiny beads that catch the light. Sparkly, ridiculous things.
I’ve spent the better part of my life avoiding anything that loud, anything that cheerful. Color has always felt like it belongs to people who haven’t seen what I’ve seen. And yet I find myself reaching over and pocketing them before I’ve made any conscious decision to do so.
And for the life of me, I hate that I don’t hate it.