PART 4:

I’ve had worse. That’s not really the point. He almost smiled. Not quite. Luciano ended the call. He set the phone face up on the seat beside him and looked at her with his full attention for the first time since the elevator. And she understood immediately why Declan had said his name the way he had. There was a quality to his focus that was different from most people’s.

Not aggressive, not performed, just complete, like a door with no gaps in it. Where’s the drive? He said. She blinked. What? The drive you found? Where is it? I don’t I didn’t take it. I put it back before he came home. Something shifted in his expression. Not anger exactly. Recalculation. You put it back. I panicked.

I thought if it was back where I found it, he wouldn’t know I’d seen it. She paused. That didn’t work. No. He said it didn’t. He picked his phone back up and typed something. What did you read? Enough. specifically. She looked at him. The car moved through a yellow light and the rain eased slightly, and she thought about what Cara had said to her once years ago after Rowan had gotten out of a situation badly by refusing to read what was in front of her face.

You see what you want to see until you can’t anymore, and by then it costs you. Financial transfers through at least four offshore structures, she said. references to suppressed testimony in what looked like a regulatory proceeding, an email chain that mentioned a name, Alderman Crest, I think, and used the word resolved.

There was a notation that referenced body recovery at Lake Calumett. Lutiano was quiet. And a folder I didn’t get into before I heard the elevator, she said. It was labeled with a name, first name only, Marco. The car went very still. Not the people in it. They didn’t move noticeably, but something in the atmosphere of the car changed.

A pressure drop, the kind you felt before weather. Enzo turned his head slowly and looked at Luchiano. Luchiano was looking at the window. What? She said. Nothing, he said. That’s not nothing. You both just I heard you. He turned back and the recalculation was still happening behind his eyes, faster now.

and whatever it was landing on, it wasn’t making things simpler. We’ll talk about it when we’re somewhere that isn’t moving. They pulled into an underground structure 40 minutes later. She’d lost track of where they were, north side somewhere. The street signage had been sparse, and the car stopped in a bay that held three other vehicles, all dark, all the same flavor of deliberate anonymity.

The building above them was old, industrial bones with money poured into the bones. She’d worked with enough real estate developers to read a conversion project, and this one was thorough. The elevator inside was smooth and silent, which meant it was new, but the walls around it were raw concrete, and the ceiling had reinforced duct work that hadn’t been prettied up.

The apartment on the sixth floor was the size of a modest house. open floor plan, concrete and steel, and very little softness in the materials. But there was a couch that looked like it had been sat in by someone who actually needed it, and a kitchen that had been used by a person rather than staged for a photo. She registered these things.

She registered the windows blacked out, and the door they’d come through reinforced two locks she could see and probably others she couldn’t. and she registered the fact that she was noting all of this and understood what it meant about her current mental state. She was mapping exits. She was doing it automatically. She sat down at the kitchen table because her legs were done and she was not going to let anyone in this room see them go before she was seated.

Luciano put his jacket over a chair. He was wearing a dark shirt underneath, no tie sleeves he rolled up before he said anything else. The gesture was so ordinary that it caught her slightly off guard. a man rolling up his sleeves in a kitchen at midnight like the next thing was doing dishes. “You need water,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“I need to know what’s happening.” He got a glass from a cabinet, filled it from the tap, and set it in front of her. “Drink it first.” She drank it. She was thirstier than she’d realized. He sat down across from her. Enzo stayed standing near the counter, which he was starting to understand was his natural position in any given room, slightly to the side, slightly behind the main event, watching.

Declan Pierce has been building a secondary financial structure for approximately 6 years. Luciano said, “Clean money goes in through the tech companies. Dirty money comes out through the offshore holding network you saw on the drive. The amounts aren’t small.” How do you know the amounts? because I’ve seen this architecture before.

Different names, same blueprint. He held her eyes. He’s been connected to criminal operations on the financial side, not running them, servicing them. And you, she said, “Which side are you on?” The silence lasted exactly long enough to be honest. I run operations, he said. I have since I was 22. What that means specifically isn’t something I’m going to walk you through tonight, but I want you to understand that I’m not a banker for it, and I’m not a politician for it.

What Declan does and what I do aren’t the same thing, but they’re related in the way that a river and a reservoir are related. Yes. She pressed her palms flat against the table. Then why are you helping me? Because you texted me. That’s not a reason. It’s the reason I picked up, he said. The reason I stayed is different. She waited.

The name in that folder, he said. Marco. Who is he? Luchiano looked at his hands for a moment. They were still. Everything about him was still in a way that took control, not someone who was naturally still, someone who had decided to be. My brother, he said, younger by 5 years. He died four years ago. The official story was an accident during a financial transfer negotiation that went wrong. He looked up.

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