“I’m not going.”
Silas glanced down at his tablet. “Your mother was transferred this morning to a private oncology suite. Dr. Elias Thorne has already reviewed her scans. The deposit has been paid.”
Lydia went still. “How do you know about my mother?”
Silas met her eyes. “Miss Hart, Mr. Cross does not invest in unknown variables.”
Ten minutes later she was in the back of a black Maybach heading into Lower Manhattan, furious at herself for getting in, more furious at the fact that she would have climbed into a tank if it meant helping her mother.
Cross Tower rose over the Financial District in polished glass and silence. The private elevator took her to the top floor, where the doors opened into an office larger than her entire apartment building. Glass walls. Steel lines. A view of the Hudson like a private kingdom. It looked less like a workspace than a command center designed by someone who believed beauty should always feel a little threatening.
Damon stood by the window in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. Without the nightclub lighting, he looked even more dangerous because he looked more real.
“You’re late,” he said.
“You had me picked up like a hostage.”
“I upgraded your transportation.”
Lydia set her jaw. “You can’t buy people, Mr. Cross.”
“Can’t I?”
He crossed the room, dropped a thick file on the desk, and pushed it toward her.
“Peterson was selling information. He used a book cipher layered with slang substitutions and numerical shifts. I want you to break it.”
She stared at the pages. Russian fragments, time stamps, coded numbers, Italian notations. It looked like a fever dream assembled by a paranoid mathematician.
“I’m a linguistics researcher.”
“You’re a pattern hunter,” Damon said. “Same difference.”
“And why would I help you?”
His expression sharpened. “Because last night you saved my life. Because the men behind Peterson now know your face. Because your mother is receiving the best care in New York. And because if I don’t find the leak first, the people who planted it will come for both of us.”
That was the part that trapped her. Not the money. Not the threat. The logic.
So Lydia said the only thing she could say without hating herself.
“I need three monitors, port =”, and coffee.”
A smile ghosted across Damon’s mouth. “Black?”
“Obviously.”
For the next forty-eight hours Lydia disappeared into code.
Peterson’s cipher was ugly and brilliant. Russian criminal slang embedded in transliterated Cockney, numerical substitutions mapped to shipping manifests, hidden patterns tied to tidal schedules in Newark Harbor. The more she decoded, the clearer the architecture became. Peterson had not merely been leaking information. He had been rerouting entire containers.
Late on the second night, Damon came into the office carrying a plate of food and found Lydia wearing one of his spare shirts because her own clothes had become intolerable.
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