Page 21 of Ruthless Bond

Not because anyone asks me to. Because the spreadsheet I’ve been building in my head for three weeks finally needs to exist outside of it, and I can’t create it at home on my personal laptop without raising questions about why I have access to the data I’d need to populate it. So I wait until the floor empties, until Patricia gathers her coat and her bag and gives me a nod that’s half approval and half suspicion. Until the cleaning crew comes and goes and the overhead lights switch to their after-hours setting, dimmer, casting longer shadows between the cubicle walls.

Katya left an hour ago. She doesn’t shadow me inside the building after hours. I think she trusts the security system to do the watching for her, or maybe she’s been told that keeping me under constant surveillance will backfire eventually. Either way, I’m alone on the thirty-eighth floor for the first time since I started, and the solitude feels like a door opening.

I work fast. I pull up the vendor files I’ve been reviewing for weeks and start mapping financial relationships Patricia’s filing system doesn’t show. Not just the connections between entities, but the timing. When each LLC was created, when each payment was initiated, when each subcontractor relationship was established. The timeline tells a story the individual records don’t. Shell companies created in clusters, three or four in the same week, using the same registered agent. Payments initiated in sequences that suggest coordination rather than independent transactions.

I’m deep in the numbers when I hear the elevator. It’s past nine. The floor is supposed to be empty. I minimize my spreadsheet out of reflex and listen. The elevator doors open on my floor. Footsteps. Two sets, one heavy and deliberate, one lighter, hurried. Then voices, too low to make out words, coming from the direction of the corner offices on the east side of the floor.

I should leave. I should close my laptop and walk to the elevator and go home and pretend I didn’t hear anything. That’s what a smart woman working off a debt to a crime family would do.

I’m a smart woman. I’m also my father’s daughter.

I slip off my shoes so my heels don’t click on the tile. I move along the row of cubicles toward the east side, keeping low, staying in the shadows between the pools of dim overhead light. The voices are coming from a glass-walled office that belongs to someone whose name I don’t know, a man I’ve seen in meetings but who’s never been introduced to me. The blinds on the glass are half-drawn. I can see through the gaps.

Roman is in the room. Across from him is a man I’ve never seen before. Mid-forties, expensive coat, bruised knuckles, the kind of man who looks more at ease in a back room than a boardroom. The man is sitting in a chair, but not comfortably. He’s leaning forward, elbows on his knees, and even from this far away I can see the sweat shining on his forehead and the way his hands are shaking. He’s talking fast, his words tumbling over each other, and his body language is the universal posture of a person who knows he’s in trouble and is trying to talk his way out of it.

Roman listens. He doesn’t move. He stands with his arms at his sides and his head tilted slightly to the left, and there’s something predatory in his stillness that makes every instinct I have pay attention.

The man says something I can’t hear but that lands wrong. Some invisible boundary gets crossed. Roman’s head straightens. His shoulders roll back.

“DeSanto doesn’t own Halsted,” Roman says quietly.

The man answers too fast. “I told him that. I told him the Voronovs—”

“You told him after you sold him our schedule.”

And then Roman moves.

I’ve seen people move fast before. I grew up watching athletes on television, watching my father’s reflexes in the kitchen, watching the quick hands of men who dealt cards and counted cash for a living. I know what human fast looks like.

This isn’t that.

Roman’s hand closes around the man’s throat so quickly that my eyes can’t track the transition between standing still and gripping flesh. One frame he’s across the desk. The next frame he’s not. There’s no in-between, no blur of motion, no visible acceleration. He’s simply there, and then he’s somewhere else, and the somewhere else is wrapped around a man’s neck, lifting him out of the chair with one arm.

One arm. The man isn’t small. He’s got fifty, sixty pounds on me, easily, and Roman is holding him off the ground by his throat with one hand extended, his arm locked straight, and is posture doesn’t change. His breathing doesn’t change. He holds a grown man in the air the way you’d hold a bag of groceries, with the same thoughtless ease.

The man’s feet are kicking six inches off the floor. His hands are clawing at Roman’s wrist. Roman says something to him, close and quiet, and I watch the man’s face go from red to white. Not from the choking. From whatever Roman said.

Roman sets him down. The man’s knees buckle and he catches himself on the desk. Roman straightens his cuffs. He says one more thing, and the man nods so fast his head looks like it might come loose. Roman turns and walks toward the door.

I press myself flat against the cubicle wall, my heart slamming against my ribs, my bare feet cold on the tile. He walks past the end of my row. He doesn’t look in my direction. But as he passes, no more than fifteen feet from where I’m standing with my back against the fabric wall and my hand pressed over my mouth, I see his face in profile.

His eyes are gold. Glowing. A deep, burning amber that has no business being in a human face, luminous and animal and wrong in a way that makes my stomach clench and my legs go weak.

He reaches the elevator. The doors open. He steps in and turns and faces forward. For one terrible second I think he’s going to look directly at me, that those gold eyes are going to sweep the floor and find me cowering behind a cubicle wall. But the doors close and he’s gone, and the floor is silent again except for the hum of the ventilation system and the ragged sound of my own breathing.

I stand there for a long time. My legs won’t stop shaking. From inside the office I hear the man coughing, the scrape of a chair, unsteady footsteps. He comes out a minute later, moving fast, one hand braced against the wall for balance. He doesn’t look in my direction. He goes straight to the elevator, jabs the button, and disappears inside it. Even from across the floor I can see the red marks on his throat where Roman’s fingers were.

I wait until the elevator returns empty. Then I go back to my desk, and my hands are trembling so badly that when I try to close my laptop case, I fumble the latch three times.

I think about what I just saw. A man lifted off the ground with one arm and no effort. Speed that my eyes couldn’t process. Eyes that burned gold in a face that was otherwise entirely, terrifyingly human.

I think about the infrared readings. I think about the claw marks my father documented in the alley behind the restaurant. I think about the way Dominic’s hand felt against mine, burning hot, and how his eyes go gray and flat when he’s controlling something behind them, and I wonder what color they’d be if he stopped controlling it.

I put on my shoes. I close my laptop. I walk to the elevator and press the button and ride it down to the lobby and walk through the marble atrium toward the exit.

The security guard at the desk gives me a nod. “Working late, Ms. Marchelli?”

“Just finishing up.”