Chapter 8 - The Ledger’s True Owner
The damp air of the tunnel seemed to freeze in my lungs. I stared at the brass key resting on Larkin’s palm, then up into his dark, unblinking eyes.
"Don't lie to me," I whispered, the revolver in my hand rising another inch, the barrel aligning squarely with the center of his chest. "I read the file, Larkin. I saw the authorization code. Steves, L. Permanent termination of audit assets. She was found in the East River forty-eight hours later."
"She wasn't found in the river," Larkin said, his voice dropping into a low, steady cadence that brooked no argument, even under the threat of a loaded gun. "The body they pulled from the water was an informant from the Russian bratva who had been stealing from the syndicate. Your mother found out Viktor Vance was using her accounting division to launder cartel drug money through offshore shell companies. When she tried to whistleblow to the federal prosecutor's office, Vance put a hit out on her."
"If that's true," I countered, my hands shaking slightly despite my best efforts, "why did you take me in? Why hire the daughter of the woman the syndicate murdered, put her in a cubicle for three years, and treat her like dirt?"
"Because the day Viktor Vance murdered your mother, he left a copy of her master ledger on my desk with a note written in her blood: Next is your family, Larkin." He took a slow step closer, ignoring the black circle of my gun barrel. "I couldn't protect her then. I was twenty-four, newly appointed to the board, with no leverage and no power. So I built a cage. I kept you invisible on the forty-second floor where Vance's enforcers would never look twice at you. I gave you a boring job, a salary, and an unbreakable firewall so you could build the very weapon you carried into that ballroom tonight."
The silence in the tunnel was absolute, broken only by the distant, heavy rumble of an uptown express train vibrating through the bedrock above us.
"You planned this," I realized, the pieces suddenly clicking together with terrifying clarity. "The gala. Bringing me down there. You didn't expect me to be humiliated—you engineered it to force Vance into the open."
"Vance was bleeding the syndicate dry through the Swiss accounts," Larkin admitted, a grim smile touching the corner of his mouth. "I needed him to see the ghost of Evelyn Woods walk back into the Continental. I needed him to panic. I just didn't anticipate you wearing four-thousand-dollar armor and breaking Thomas’s wrist in the first ten minutes."
Before I could process the staggering weight of his confession, a sharp, metallic clink echoed from the tunnel entrance behind us.
May you like
The heavy steel hatch we had just bolted was rattling. Someone was on the other side, hammering a crowbar against the lock with methodical, bone-rattling force.
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