6. Lucian
LUCIAN
At dawn the next morning, I stop pretending I can sleep and knock on her door. Surprised that she never tried to escape after seeing what she saw.
It's been two days since she memorized the road here. Yesterday she had the run of a house in disarray, medics coming and going, doors unguarded while my people counted casualties and swept the grounds, every opportunity she'd been waiting for, handed to her at once, but she used none of them.
"Come in," she shouts.
She's sitting up against the headboard, fully dressed, the evidence beside her on the quilt, and her eyes are red-rimmed and furious.
"I have questions," she says. "Roughly four thousand of them. Starting with my firm. I vanished in the middle of an engagement, my apartment was broken into, and nobody there even knows whether I'm alive."
"Hector checked. Your partners weren't involved," I confirm. "But the syndicate was watching the firm's server. That's how they knew how close you were getting."
"So I was right not to take it to the partners?"
"You were right not to put anyone else in the path of it."
"I'll answer more, but come downstairs first. There's coffee, and people you should meet before you decide anything."
She's on her feet before I finish. "People like you."
"Yes. And people who aren't like me, but who'll be just as dead as those families we protect if you finish your case."
That's not fair, and I watch it land like it isn't, a flinch she covers fast. But she follows me down.
The hall still smells of cordite and the crew's already halfway through replacing the front glass.
She takes it all in without slowing, the boarded window, the scorch along the banister, Hector directing two men with a length of timber.
He gives her a nod she doesn't expect. She returns it before she can stop herself.
I take her to the morning room, where three of my pride are waiting because I texted ahead, and I watch her read the room like a case.
An older man with a contractor's hands and a burn scar he earned pulling a family out of a house fire in Missouri.
A woman in her sixties who taught half this town's children to read and has relocated more shifters than any operative I employ.
A boy of nineteen, one of last night's defenders, his arm in a sling that'll be off by tomorrow.
"You want me to trust three strangers because you say so," Sophie says.
"No. They're here so you can ask them anything you like, and you should pay attention to their faces while they answer, because you told me yourself, faces are harder to fake."
She turns to the older man. "Who are you?"
"Hollow Ridge Construction."
"You're in the ledger. Eight invoices to entities that don't build anything."
He doesn't flinch. "We build the houses nobody's supposed to find.
Root cellars that are really safe rooms, false walls, a cabin up near the Kepler place has a basement the county records will never show, because Kurtis' clan poured that foundation at night.
" He shrugs one heavy shoulder. "You flagged eight invoices.
There've been forty. I'm proud of every one. "
She moves down the line, asking the teacher about a transfer to a shell in Nevada, and she tells her it bought a birth certificate for a wolf pup whose parents were killed by those who came yesterday.
She asks the boy why he stood and took fire for people he isn't related to, and he stares at her like the question makes no sense.
"Because they'd do it for me," he says.
Her worldview buckles in real time, it's not a collapse, she's too disciplined for that, it's slower, a load-bearing wall being carefully replaced while the roof still has to stand.
"Say I believe the money's clean." Her voice is steady, which costs her.
"Say the shells hide people instead of profits.
That still leaves my original problem, Lucian, it just inverts it.
Somebody tried to kill me for this. Somebody sent a crew up a private mountain in under a day.
If your network is the good guys, then who wants it exposed, and how do they know it exists? "
"That's the right question." I sit across from her. "It's the question I've been unable to answer for two years, and you unraveled decades of my grandfather's work in nineteen days. So I'm going to make you an offer I've never made a human being outside this supernatural world."
"Careful. I don't accept offers I haven't audited."
"I know. That's why I'm making it. Come see the rest, not a slideshow, the real thing. Let me take you to one of the houses your spreadsheet paid for, so you're not trusting my face or theirs, you're trusting your own eyes. Then decide whether you finish your case."
She studies me. "And if I still decide to finish it?"
"Then I'll have shown a hostile forensic accountant every secret my family has protected over the generations, and I'll deserve whatever comes." I actually mean it. "But you won't. You didn't run to a phone last night when there were a dozen chances. You already know."
The safe house is forty minutes out, past Kian's outfitter store, up a logging road that dead-ends at what looks like a hunting lodge and isn't.
Sophie is quiet the whole journey, but it's a working quiet now, not a hostile one.
We pull up, and she takes in the propane tank that's really a ventilation intake, the satellite dish angled at nothing, the woodpile stacked to hide a reinforced door.
I don't point any of it out. She finds each one herself, a discovery she makes is worth more than a fact I give her.
Inside there are two families. A bear clan out of Ohio, the ones her Cedar Bend anomaly paid to move, still jumpy three weeks after a raid took their eldest. A wolf and her daughter with fresh papers and old fear.
They don't perform for her. The little girl is doing long division on paper and gets stuck.
Sophie, before she's decided to, I think, leans over and shows her the trick with the remainder, and the kid laughs, and the room's temperature changes.
We step outside afterward, and Sophie stands at the rail of the porch and glances out at the trees for a while before she speaks.
"I built a case that would have found this place," she says quietly.
"A federal agent would've walked up that road with a warrant and a good conscience and handed that little girl to whoever took the bear clan's son.
" She turns to me, and her eyes are wet, level and terrible.
"I've always believed the numbers don't lie.
I just couldn't read the language they were written in. "
"Now you can." I keep my voice low. "So read it with me. Find the ones who sent last night's crew. I don't need protecting from you. I actually need you."
She wipes her face with her bandaged hand, annoyed at herself, and gives me a look I'm starting to recognize. Half challenge, half admiration.
"Okay, Ashcroft," she says. "But we do it my way. Full access, no locked drawers. And when I question anything, you answer it even when you don't want to."
"Agreed. Come on. We've got a syndicate to find, and you owe that little girl a better world than the one you almost handed her."