Lila rested her cheek on Dixon’s shoulder, not knowing what to say. He squeezed her closer, and they looked up at the stars for a time. She nearly drifted away to dreams despite the cold. It was then that Lila understood why she enjoyed being around Dixon so very much.
He calmed her. He quieted the whirring and clinking in her mind. His silence and the silence it created within soothed her like a warm fire on a cold night. He had always been difficult to turn away from.
Tristan flicked the switch, made it spin in double time. He tired her out.
“You’re impossible, Dixon.”
No, just improbable. Don’t think well of me. I wanted bragging rights. I won’t ever let him forget that I kissed you first. Not ever.
Lila poked his ribs, and Dixon squirmed and laughed. In the alley below, Samantha looked up from her patrol.
“I have to go, Dixon,” she said, hiding her face. “Thanks for taking care of my clothes.”
No problem. Tristan and the others are proud. It meant more than laundry to him. Try to remember that.
Lila nodded and ducked back through the window.
Chapter 18
Lila slipped on her fluffy white robe and flopped down on the edge of the wet tub, applying ointment and a few bandages to her heels. Her stomach churned at the smell. She had stayed up all night digging into the second Liberté account, an account owned by Sun Leasing Company, a company in name only. It possessed no ties to any highborn or lowborn companies in the commonwealth, not even in the empire as far as she could tell, and there was no trace of an owner or receptionist. Even the company’s address had been a lie, for it belonged to a small museum up north, a museum devoted to a long-dead composer.
While the account holder had been careful, the people sending money or receiving it might have been sloppy. Lila soon turned her attention to them, hoping for a break. Natalie Holguín, along with scores of others, had been making regular payments to the company on the first of every month. Lila might have dismissed the payments as rent, but the amounts were too high. Why had a leasing company paid off two blackcoats, anyway? Why had it paid off Slack & Roberts? They were lawyers who specialized in criminal law, not real estate.
Why did several of the accounts seem so damn familiar?
It hadn’t been until she received the sixth alert on her palm that she realized where she’d seen them before.
The BIRD job.
She’d pulled up the folder on her desktop computer immediately, nearly kicking herself for not realizing the connection at Chaucer’s Ghost. The folder contained all the information her father had sent her for the BIRD job. Lila had done extensive research on every highborn that had been bribed. She’d then made a list of their bank account numbers, looking for patterns.
It didn’t take her long to track down the two familiar accounts. One belonged to Bo Park, a distant cousin of Suji Park. Chairwoman Weberly’s niece owned the other.
Natalie Holguín also graced the list.
The three names and accounts could not be a coincidence.
Sun Leasing belonged to Zephyr.
That meant that Muller and Davies also worked for the snoop, just like Slack & Roberts.
When the seventh alert hit her palm, she hadn’t let it fluster her. She just needed a bit more time. Zephyr might be racing through the layers of her fake identity, but the snoop still had to put together those small inconsistencies, the bits she did not have the access to change, like a photograph torn into pieces must be reassembled to glimpse the whole.
This photograph would not reveal a person, though; it would only reveal an amalgam of personalities. Pieces that could never quite fit together, slightly jagged and mismatched, shreds of different portraits of different people.
The finished photograph would give Prolix away in the end.
But that wouldn’t happen until Zephyr tried to put it together and recognized something was wrong with the data. It wouldn’t be possible, shouldn’t be possible, until all the layers had been stripped away.
Only five remained.
But Lila had found Zephyr’s trail at last.
Unfortunately, she still had a day job. A day job that required more attention than she could give it at the moment, and required several cups of coffee to attempt. She dressed and returned to her office on a nearly healed ankle, handling the most urgent reports first, letting the rest of her paperwork pile higher and higher.
Luckily, Commander Sutton picked up the slack, becoming concerned when Lila did not rush down to the cafeteria at breakfast. Lila only skipped waffles or pancakes when she was sick or stressed or busy.
To her credit, Sutton didn’t ask for an explanation. She slipped a plate of food on Lila’s desk and took a stack of reports, asking if she might have the pleasure of handling the ten o’clock commanders’ meeting.