16. Lucian
LUCIAN
By morning Sophie has enough to walk into Ashcroft Holdings and prove the leak lives at the executive level, so we drive into the city to the one building where I've never once felt unsafe.
It's a strange dread, being uneasy inside your own headquarters.
Forty floors of glass I built, and today it all feels like it's watching.
Sophie sits beside me in the executive elevator with a folder that could crack my company open, and she's calm the way she gets when the stakes are highest, all the sarcasm boiled down to pure focus.
"Say it back to me," I tell her. "Clean. I need to hear exactly what we have before I do anything I can't undo."
"We have the level, not the man." She doesn't glance at her notes; she's lived in this for weeks.
"The live-routing credential that pulled the evac routes before yesterday's strikes came from the executive floor.
Not middle management, not operations staff, a credential with suite-level authority, the kind only a handful of people hold.
The historical scrubs came from that same tier, in the same dead batch window, going back thirteen years.
" She pivots to me. "So I can prove it's someone at the very top.
Someone who's had continuous senior access since before your father died.
I can't yet prove which person. Two people still fit, and I won't name one until the evidence names him for me. "
I've walked these halls for years believing the people were the last I'd ever have to doubt. Now the whole floor feels suspect, and I catch myself studying those I've trusted with my life for a tell I wouldn't have searched for a month ago.
"Two chairs," I say. "You're certain it's not lower."
"Certain. Lower access can't touch the routing system or the batch window. This is a person who sits where you sit, near enough." She closes the folder. "Which is why we don't confront anyone today. We confirm, then we move. Not the other way around."
We don't accuse. That's Sophie's ruling, and she's right. Everything in me wants to gather the executive floor and let the lion show in my eyes until someone's pulse gives them away. Sophie stops me in the corridor with a hand flat on my chest, the same gesture she used in the vault.
"If you tip your hand before we know exactly who, you warn the guilty one and insult the loyal one," she says, low and fast. "A traitor this senior has planned an exit for years.
Spook him and he runs, and if he does that with the master database, every safe house on the continent is attacked by tomorrow.
" Her eyes hold mine. "I know it's the hardest thing ever.
But walk this floor like it's any other day, shake hands.
Give me the time to turn names into one, we can't be sure it's Clifford yet, and then you can be as much of a lion as you want. "
I face the glass corridor at the executive offices, at gray heads bent over desks, at men laughing on phones, all at ease, all possibly the one. One of them sold six children off a mountain and is smiling at a colleague right now. I force a nod.
"You did it," Sophie murmurs. "You just kept the whole game alive."
It doesn't feel like a victory. It feels like I shook a killer's hand and didn't know whose.
Back at the manor that night, I gather the pride and tell them what's coming. In the great hall where Sophie once watched me come apart into a lion, and I face the people I've led for a decade.
"The traitor is real, and he's close," I tell them.
"Not one of us, but trusted by us. Someone senior.
Sophie's narrowed it to a very short list, and within days she'll have the last name standing.
When she does, it's going to hurt like hell, because we'll each realize how long we smiled and trusted him. "
"You're not going to tell us who you suspect," the teacher says. Not an accusation. A quiet understanding.
"No. Because I might be wrong, and I won't poison you against anyone that may be loyal. We move only when Sophie says it's secure. Every instinct you have will scream to move sooner. Don't, her patience has carried us this far. We honor it."
They take it the way this pride takes everything, quietly, seriously, with the steadiness of people who've buried their own. Hector gives the single nod that means he'll hold the line. The boy looks like he wants to hit something and has nowhere to put it.
Afterward, Sophie and I stand on the cold terrace, and I make her a promise I mean to keep with my life.
"Whatever it takes," I tell her, "we finish this together. I don't do the reckless lion thing and get myself killed being noble. You don't do the reckless accountant thing and walk into a building alone. We end him as partners or not at all."
"No matter the cost," she agrees, leaning into me. "Though for the record, my reckless accountant thing has a better survival rate than your reckless lion thing."
"It does not."
Sophie's phone vibrates against the terrace table. She glances at it, then straightens.
"What?"
She doesn't answer immediately. Her thumb moves across the screen.
"Sophie."
"Someone just accessed the executive archive."
I turn toward her. "Which account?"
"One of the two we're watching." She opens the security log and holds it between us. "Eleven forty-seven. No scheduled work, no meeting, nothing that explains why anyone should be in there."
Another notification appears, then another, and her expression shifts.
"He's pulling files."
"What files?"
She scrolls, and my stomach twists.
"Safe-house routing. Identity records. Relocation schedules. Lucian, he's taking the database."
"Can you stop it?"
"If I kill his access now, he'll know we're watching."
The phone vibrates again, and a new line appears beneath the others.
External transfer initiated.
Sophie goes completely still.
"He knows," she says.
I look toward the dark shape of town below us.
"Then we've run out of time."