Page 59 of Maksym

Grace stared down into the mug for several seconds. Her thumbs rested along the curve of the ceramic. The red tint on her mouth had softened slightly where she had pressed her lips together. Her eyeliner remained flawless. The woman looked prepared to cross-examine her own ruin.

When she spoke, her voice had changed. Not empty. Never that. Disciplined.

“I was an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Arizona,” she said. “My work focused on complex financial crime and trafficking cases.”

Taras’s pen touched paper. The scratch began. Grace heard it. Her eyes flicked briefly toward him.

“You can take notes.”

“I intended to,” Taras said.

“I assumed.”

A shadow of something moved near her mouth. Not humor, but its skeletal remains.

She took a sip of coffee, swallowed, and continued.

“Lucian Devereux presented publicly as a real estate investor with a financial services arm attached. Finance and stock trading. Private investments. Commercial property. Some development. Some charitable giving where the numbers were clean enough to be smug about it.”

Remy sat still at the head of the table, hands folded now, no longer annexing space with posture. She listened like a ward being laid: silent, precise, meant to hold.

“My office had seen his name before,” Grace said. “Not as a target. As a peripheral entity. A transaction here. A property transfer there. A wire routed through an account that had no business touching another account. Nothing obvious enough for a normal review to prioritize.”

Her fingers tightened around the mug.

“But I built my reputation on things that weren’t obvious. That was my value. I saw patterns. Irregularities. Threads that didn’t belong.”

She looked briefly at Lucian’s photograph, still angled away from her but not fully hidden.

“I pulled one.”

Taras wrote faster.

“What thread?” I asked quietly.

Grace did not look offended by the interruption. Perhaps because I asked like a man gathering evidence, not one doubting her.

“A sequence of trades connected to commercial acquisitions in Phoenix,” she said. “Too well-timed. Too insulated. The entities involved changed names, but the behavior repeated. Shell layers, proxy managers, charitable cover, some limited partnerships that should have been dormant but moved money at convenient times.”

Her voice steadied as she entered the familiar terrain of fraud.

“Most people think financial crime is about greed. It is, but greed is rarely original. Money leaves habits. Even laundered money. Especially laundered money. People think washing something makes it untraceable. It mostly makes them repeat their preferred method of washing.”

Taras paused long enough to glance at me.

I knew that look.

Grace had just become even more dangerous to Lucian than I had already believed.

She continued, “At first I thought securities fraud. Then maybe political corruption. Then human trafficking. The structure looked too much like cases I had prosecuted before. Legitimate business fronts. Cash movement. Properties held through layers. People with expensive lawyers who thought complexity was innocence.”

Her mouth tightened.

“I asked questions.”

Something cold moved through my blood.

“Who knew?” Remy asked, her voice careful.