The penthouse was not what I expected.

I'd expected the kind of place that announces itself — all glass and chrome and artwork chosen by committee. What I got was something different. Spare. Clean. High-end in the way that comes from quality over quantity, everything chosen with precision and nothing chosen for show.

One of the things chosen with precision: the room they gave me was on the opposite end of the floor from his. There was a sitting room between us. And the room itself had a lock, which I checked immediately.

It locked.

Mrs. Park — his housekeeper, sixties, the kind of woman who ran a household the way generals ran campaigns — showed me around with the efficiency of someone who'd done this before.

Which probably meant he'd had live-in assistants before.

I didn't ask.

"Mr. Thorne takes breakfast at seven," she said. "He prefers not to be spoken to before coffee. Dinner at eight when he's in the city, otherwise he eats at the office. Your schedule is synced to his — you'll get notifications."

"And when he travels?"

"You travel with him." She said this like it was perfectly normal. "Is that a problem?"

"No," I said. It wasn't. I had a passport and no particular attachment to staying in one city.

She showed me the kitchen — open to my use, within reason — and the office I'd be sharing when working from the penthouse, and the car that would take me to Thorne Capital's offices when Maxim wasn't going directly.

Maxim.

I'd been calling him Mr. Thorne in my head and I needed to keep doing that.

He arrived at seven-fifteen.

I heard him before I saw him — the specific sound of someone who moves through spaces with authority, not volume. He came into the kitchen while I was making coffee, stopped when he saw me, and said: "You're already here."

"You said tomorrow," I said. "It's tomorrow."

He looked at the coffee.

I poured him a cup. Set it on the counter.

He looked at it.

"You don't know how I take it," he said.

"Black," I said. "You had it that way in both meetings where I've seen you. You also don't use the sweetener packets that come with office coffee, which means you don't want them, not that you forgot them."

He picked up the cup.

He didn't say thank you. He also didn't say I was wrong.

"Your first task," he said. "The Alderman file. It's on your desk. I need a full reconciliation by noon."

"The Alderman Group?" I said.

"Yes."

I knew the Alderman Group. It was one of the files I'd been working on before the reassignment. It was also one of the files where the numbers had done the thing — the loop, the sideways look.

"All right," I said.

"Also—" He was already moving toward his office. "Schedule a call with Frankfurt for three. And clear my Thursday afternoon."

"For what?"

He stopped. Turned. Looked at me with the expression that was becoming familiar: not annoyed, just recalibrating.

"I'll let you know what for," he said.

He went to his office.

I went to mine.

The Alderman file was twelve inches thick. I set it on the desk and started from the first page, the way you do when you're not just reconciling — when you're looking for something.

At nine-fifteen I found it.

It wasn't obvious. It never was, with the good ones. But there was a sub-account that received a quarterly transfer, and the transfer originated from a holding company, and the holding company had an address in the Cayman Islands, and the address was the same address as a company I'd seen in three other files.

Three other files.

Same address. Different company names. Different intermediaries. But the same structure underneath, like someone had used a template.

I sat back.

I looked at the ceiling.

I thought about my father's loan and the person who'd structured it.

Daniel Croft.

I pulled three more files.

The address appeared in all three.

I was still staring at the screen when the door opened.

Maxim stood in the doorway.

He looked at the three files spread across my desk.

He looked at my screen.

His expression didn't change.

"The Alderman reconciliation," he said.

"Is going to be late," I said. "I found something."

"What did you find?"

I held his gaze.

This was the moment. I could close the files, do the reconciliation, say nothing. Keep my head down and wait out the twelve months.

Or I could say the thing I'd found.

"A pattern," I said. "Three Cayman accounts with the same registered address. Cross-referenced through different holding companies but structurally identical." I paused. "Someone built a system."

He looked at the files.

"What did you do with what you found?" he said.

"Nothing yet," I said. "I'm telling you."

"Why are you telling me?"

I held his gaze.

"Because you're either behind it," I said, "or you're not. And if you're not, you need to know."

The office was very quiet.

He came in. Closed the door.

He looked at the screen.

"Show me," he said.