Page 34 of South of Justice

He held up a hand, stopping her. “No need. If the cap couldn’t handle your work, the cap was wrong.”

Lucía blinked.

He crossed the room slowly, folding his arms as he stopped beside her desk. His black eyes flicked across her screen.

“This is the deep-structure model,” he said, more statement than question.

Lucía nodded. “I got the blind routing fix to work. It replicates how the shell accounts use intentional misalignment with tax jurisdictions, like you suggested. I nested it inside a parallel index that breaks anytime an observer tries to reverse-engineer it in real time. That was the trick.”

He was silent for a beat. Then: “Show me.”

Her throat tightened. “Now?”

He smiled, and it almost reached his eyes. “Unless you’ve got dinner plans.”

She definitely didn’t. And even if she had, she would have canceled them.

He nodded once toward the glass hallway. “Come. Let’s look at it properly.”

Lucía hesitated for only a moment. Then she grabbed her laptop and followed him. The click of her heels echoed softly in the dark.

Lucía set her laptop down on the conference table and tried not to notice her own reflection in its polished glass.

Javier moved around the table slowly, adjusting the angle of the nearest chair so it faced her more directly. Then he sat, long limbs relaxed, one ankle casually hooked over his knee.

“Begin,” he said.

She opened the simulation, voice steady despite the rapid thud of her heart. “So the issue with the previous trace models was always the noise. Too many false positives, especially when dealing with multi-jurisdictional flows. But if you?—”

“Where did you get the idea for the nesting failsafe?”

She hesitated, then gave a half-shrug. “I was thinking about shell games. Street hustlers. How they keep their mark guessing but also give them just enough pattern to follow…just enough to feel confident they’re winning.”

His eyes sparked with amusement. “You’ve been watching street hustlers?”

“I grew up near street markets,” she said. “They’re unavoidable.”

Javier chuckled low in his throat. “I always said good engineering begins with good crime.”

She smiled involuntarily.

They continued for another five minutes, Lucía walking him through the layers. He never looked away from her. Not even to glance at the code. It was like he was watching her explain herself, not just her work.

When she finished, she realized she’d been leaning forward, breathless. She closed the lid of the laptop, cheeks warm.

He didn’t move. He only said, “Brilliant.”

Lucía’s mouth opened, then closed again. The word hung in the air like a trick of acoustics.

“Do you know how rare it is,” he said quietly, “to meet someone who can not only build something elegant…but understand what it truly is? What it means?”

Lucía swallowed. “I think so.”

“No,” he said, his voice dropping, “you don’t.”

He reached out and, with two fingers, gently lifted a lock of hair that had fallen loose near her temple.

Lucía froze.