Chapter Four #2
His fingers were large, rough, the knuckles scarred in a way that suggested they’d seen more disagreement than agreement over the years. The silver ring caught the light, black onyx dark against his skin.
He set the note down. “These two irregularities. The vendor accounts.”
“Geno’s last fiscal year.” I turned my laptop so he could see the screen. “Constructed well enough to pass a surface audit. Quarterly numbers rounded to even thousands, every time. No remainders. No decimals. Nothing messy.”
“Real accounting is messy,” he said. Not a question. A statement.
“Real accounting looks like someone did it while having a bad day and possibly a mild headache. Perfect numbers lie. These numbers are lying with the confidence of a man who knows nobody’s checking his work.”
He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that wasn’t empty—it was full of something being measured, weighed, held up against whatever internal standard he used for these things.
Then he asked, “How do you know that?”
The question landed exactly where it was supposed to. Direct. Unadorned.
“Three years in Florence,” I said. “Nineteen years old, no money, a laptop, and what you might generously call a flexible relationship with financial borders.”
He didn’t ask the follow-up questions. Didn’t press. Didn’t dig into the parts of that sentence that were doing most of the heavy lifting. He just nodded, once, and moved on.
I filed that away. Private column. Useful things about Aristoteles Romano, volume one: he knew when to let a statement stand without dissecting it.
In a world where most people treated vulnerability like something to be exploited, that restraint was worth more than the thirty million dollars I’d found yesterday.
The conversation drifted sideways. Ari’s gaze landed on the pyramid of gold caramel wrappers in the corner of the desk, and one dark eyebrow lifted approximately a millimeter, which in Ari-speak was the equivalent of a full-body eye roll.
“Those are a legitimate business expense,” I said. “I do my best thinking with sugar. It’s science. Probably. I haven’t checked, but it feels true, and in my experience feeling true is about eighty percent of actual truth.”
“You expense caramels?”
“I expense the cognitive enhancement they provide. The caramels are merely the delivery mechanism.” I leaned back in the chair. “You’re welcome to audit me. I keep excellent records. Mostly in my head, but the head is very organized. It has filing cabinets. Metaphorical ones. With labels.”
“I might,” he said.
The way he said it landed somewhere that had nothing to do with accounting. Low. Rough. The kind of tone that suggested the audit he was considering would involve significantly less paperwork and considerably more proximity.
My pulse did something inconvenient. A quick, traitorous jump that started somewhere behind my sternum and radiated outward before I could stop it. I filed it under “physiological responses to be examined later, preferably with alcohol” and moved on.
“Looking forward to it,” I said, and meant it in at least three different ways, none of which I was planning to specify.
His eyes held mine for a beat longer than strictly necessary. Then he turned back to the laptop, and the moment closed itself with the quiet efficiency of a door being shut by someone who understood exactly what was on the other side.
He pulled his chair around to my side of the desk without asking, which was exactly the kind of boundary violation I should have objected to and somehow found myself accommodating without a single word of protest.
The chair scraped against the hardwood, and then he was there, his forearm six inches from mine on the desk, close enough that the cedar-and-coffee scent hit with the intensity of aromatherapy, and I was very professional about all of it.
Extremely professional. Award-winning professionalism. The kind of professionalism that comes with a gold medal and a speech about composure under pressure.
“The discrepancy is in the quarterly rounding,” I said, pointing at the screen without looking at him because looking at him would have been a tactical error at this distance. “Every invoice from this vendor rounds to an even thousand. No remainders. No cents. Nothing under a thousand, ever.”
His silver rings clinked softly against the desk when he shifted his weight. The sound was small, specific, and did nothing helpful for my concentration.
“Timeline starts eighteen months ago. Builds gradually—small amounts first, then escalates. Classic skimming mechanism. Inflated invoices, dummy shipments, money laundered through what looks like a construction supply front.” I scrolled through the transaction history.
“The vendor’s contact address traces to a post office box in Livorno.
Registered name doesn’t exist. I checked.
Thoroughly. The kind of thoroughly that involves calling the post office at seven in the morning and pretending to be a very concerned tax auditor, which I’m not proud of, but it worked, so... ”
He was quiet. Reading the screen, tracking the numbers with the kind of focus that suggested he was absorbing every digit and doing something complicated with them behind those black eyes.
“Who handles payroll verification?” he asked.
The question was sharp. Precise. It cut directly to the mechanism—if someone was running a dummy vendor, they’d need to either bypass payroll checks entirely or have someone inside authorizing the payments.
He’d gotten there in approximately twelve seconds, which was either impressive or irritating depending on whether you valued being the smartest person in the room, which I did, very much, and was currently reconsidering.
“Unknown,” I said. “That’s next on the list. I’d start with whoever signed off on vendor onboarding in the last two fiscal years, but the signature chains are...” I trailed off because he was looking at me.
Not at the screen.
At me.
Our eyes met at approximately four inches of distance.
Close enough that I could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the darkness of his irises that wasn’t just color, but depth, the way his lashes were just thick enough to cast faint shadows on his cheeks when the light hit them from this angle.
Neither of us moved. The room was very quiet. Somewhere in the building, a pipe clanked. A church bell rang the half-hour, distant and irrelevant.
“You’re in my light,” I said. Evenly. My voice did not do anything inconvenient, which I considered a personal victory.
“I’m not moving,” he said.
“I noticed.”
His gaze dropped. Brief. Controlled. Obvious in a way that made the control itself the tell—down to my mouth, where the caramel had left a faint shine that I was now acutely aware of, and then back up to my eyes with the deliberate patience of a man who had decided exactly how much of that impulse he was going to allow himself.