Page 80 of His Wall

She looked at the screen. She looked at me. The version of her looking at me right now was neither the woman from the bed nor the agent from the kitchen. It was both, in the same pair of gray eyes, and I felt my chest do the thing it had been doing around her since March.

"What else do you see?"

I scrolled back to the trust cluster. I let my eyes rest on the routing layer beneath it. I had built the routing layer in the spring of 2014 in a borrowed office on Lexington Avenue when Declan was away on business and Nolan was negotiating a lease in Boston. I had drawn it on a legal pad and translated it into code over a long weekend with my mother's framed photograph on the desk beside the keyboard.

It had been the piece I had been proudest of. The invisibility of the layer was the engineering. To anyone reading from the outside, the routing was background traffic. From the inside, it was a cathedral.

Conrad had moved into my cathedral.

"The judge’s payments. The dismissed cases. They all run through this same architecture."

I turned the laptop toward her.

"Conrad is not just hiding money here. He is running his entire operation through the infrastructure I built. The routing layers, the shell-company structure, the payment timing. It only works because I designed it to be invisible from the outside."

I stopped.

I looked at the screen. I looked at her.

"He cannot replicate this. It took me two years to build and it is embedded in Vanguard's founding systems. If he loses access to the Vanguard, the whole thing collapses. The judge payments stop. The dismissed cases stop. Every criminal who walked free because Conrad paid a federal judge becomes a loose end."

She stared at the screen.

She looked back at me.

"He doesn't want the Vanguard because it is valuable."

"He needs it because without it he is exposed. The takeover is not revenge, Leah. He needs the architecture back."

She looked at me for one more second.

She picked up her phone and dialed.

FIFTEEN

LEAH

I woke up with his arm across my waist.

The light through the safehouse curtains was low and gray — early, before the city had really started — and Julian was on his side beside me with his face pressed into the pillow and his breathing slow against my shoulder. His sandy hair was flat on one side. His hand was open on my stomach.

I did not slide out carefully this morning.

I stayed.

I lay there with his weight against me and his breath on my collarbone and let myself have it. The warmth. The fact that he had said Leah last night with his mouth on my skin, and it had not sounded like a case file. It had sounded like my name.

Eventually I got up. His shirt was on the floor by the bed. I pulled it on and went to the kitchen.

I made coffee with the Bureau-stocked supplies on the second shelf above the sink. The bag was a brand I had never seen at a coffee shop. The smell that came up out of the machine was acrid.

He came out in sweatpants. Hair wrecked. The white shirt I was wearing made him grin.

He crossed the small galley kitchen and came up behind me at the counter. His arms wrapped around my waist. His chin came to rest on my shoulder.

"That coffee smells criminal."

"It's all we have."