Page 111 of Ruin
I straighten up, wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and walk back into the room.
The next four hours are the most focused of my life.
Vincent and I work side by side at the table while the rest of the team cycles in and out, running errands, making calls, pulling together the pieces we need.
I've never worked with Vincent directly before.
He's always been a presence in the background, Cassius's right hand, watching me with the guarded skepticism of a man who's seen too many women come and go from his boss's orbit.
He's not watching me like that now.
Now he's watching me the way he watches Cassius—with the careful attention of someone assessing competence in real time, adjusting his estimation with each new data point.
When I pull up the shell company filings on Marco's laptop and trace the ownership chain from the Sunset Park factory through two holding companies to a Brighton Beach LLC registered to a man named Seymon Orlov, Vincent leans over my shoulder and says, "How did you find that?"
"Beneficial ownership database. It's public record, but you have to know where to look and how to read the filing codes." I click through to the next screen. "Orlov isn't a real person. The social security number attached to his corporate filings belongs to a man who died in 2014. It's a ghost entity, which means someone went to alotof trouble to hide who actually owns that building."
"And you can trace it further?"
"Give me an hour and a decent internet connection and I can trace it back to Zhukov's mother's maiden name if you want."
The corner of Vincent's mouth twitches.
It's not a smile.
Vincent doesn't smile, but it's the closest thing I've seen from him, and it feels like something earned.
Michelle calls back at eleven.
She's pulled the property records, the utility accounts, the commercial permits.
The factory has been listed as vacant for three years, but the electricity usage tells a different story.
Someone's been running serious power through that building.
Industrial-level consumption that doesn't match an empty property.
"Selene, this place is dirty," Michelle says. "The power usage alone would flag an investigation. Do you want me to refer this to?—"
"No. Don't refer it anywhere. Don't flag it, don't file it, don't mention it to anyone. Please."
A pause. The kind of pause that means Michelle is putting pieces together that I don't want her to have.
"What's going on?" she asks.
"I can't tell you. Not yet. But I need you to trust me, and I need you to sit on this."
Another pause. Longer. "You have forty-eight hours. After that, I'm reporting the power discrepancy to the utility fraud division, and whatever you're doing with this information, you need to be finished with it."
"Forty-eight hours is enough. Thank you, Michelle."
"Be careful, Selene. Whatever this is, it feels bigger than a client with a Russian problem."
I hang up and stare at my phone.
She's right. It's bigger than anything.
It's Emilia's life, and my sanity, and the last remaining thread connecting me to the person I was before Cassius Wolfe took everything and remade me in the shape of his choosing.
