“That isn’t an answer.”
“No,” he agreed. “It is the only one I can give you tonight.”
I looked at the listening device.
“Then give me another answer. Did Grant come here alone?”
Adrian’s gaze sharpened with something like approval.
“No.”
He removed his phone and opened a security photograph.
Grant stood near the service entrance talking to an older man with silver hair.
I recognized him immediately.
Gabriel Vescari.
Adrian’s uncle.
The chairman of his company.
And the man smiling beside us in every photograph taken that evening.
Part 2
By Monday morning, the bruise on my wrist had darkened into the shape of Grant’s hand.
I covered it with makeup before work.
Then I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and washed the makeup off.
For years, I had hidden every mark Grant left on me, including the ones no one could see. I was done protecting him from the evidence of what he had done.
Adrian sent a car.
I took the subway.
He sent two security officers.
I told them they could follow me if they stayed far enough back that I could pretend they weren’t there.
At nine fifteen, I entered the glass headquarters of Vescari North Atlantic carrying my appraisal case and wearing a red suit.
Adrian was waiting in the boardroom.
His gaze went straight to my wrist.
“I told you to rest.”
“You hired me for my judgment, not my obedience.”
His chief financial officer coughed to hide a smile.
Adrian pulled out a chair for me.
“Then judge.”
Spread across the table were shipping records, insurance claims, and photographs of confiscated artwork. Federal investigators believed someone had been smuggling stolen antiquities through legitimate cargo routes. The suspected objects entered the country with forged documents, disappeared inside Vescari-controlled warehouses, and resurfaced months later in private collections.
Adrian’s uncle oversaw the warehouse division.
Grant had audited the same division.
The Renaissance sketches were connected.
At first, I didn’t understand how.
Then I noticed the numbers written faintly along the bottom of the paper.
Everyone else had assumed they were old inventory marks.
They weren’t.
“They’re container codes,” I said.
Adrian leaned over my shoulder.
I pointed to the sequences.
“Four letters, seven numbers. They resemble international shipping identification codes, but they’ve been disguised as collection marks.”
His chief financial officer began comparing them to the company database.
Within minutes, he found matches.
Six containers had passed through a Vescari terminal during the previous year. All six had been approved by Gabriel’s office. All six had been audited by Grant’s department.
“What was inside?” Adrian asked.
“According to the manifests, industrial machine parts.”
“And according to reality?”
The executive swallowed. “The containers were emptied before customs inspection.”
The sketches weren’t valuable masterpieces.
They were a ledger.
Whoever had forged them had embedded transportation records into the artwork, perhaps as insurance against betrayal.
Grant had not entered the ballroom merely to humiliate me.
He had been sent to retrieve the sketches or find out how much I had discovered.
“I need to speak to him,” I said.
“No.”
Adrian’s response came instantly.
“He knows something.”
“He also assaulted you.”
“And I survived.”
“That does not make him safe.”
I pushed back from the table. “You don’t get to lock me in a tower because you’re angry.”
His voice lowered. “I am not angry.”
Every person in the room suddenly found something fascinating to study on the table.
I looked directly at him. “You look angry.”
“I am attempting not to become angry.”
“Try harder.”
The chief financial officer stood. “I think I’ll verify those container numbers from my office.”
Everyone followed him out.
When the door closed, Adrian walked to the windows.
Forty floors below, Manhattan moved like a machine.