MAFIA BOSS FOUND HIS MISSING BOOKKEEPER BLEEDING ON HER BATHROOM FLOOR JUST TWO DAYS BEFORE HIS ENGAGEMENT DINNER—BUT WHEN SHE MENTIONED HIS FIANCÉE, HE REALIZED SOMETHING WAS TERRIBLY WRONG!

Richie Romano had spent fifteen years learning not to react when someone threatened his life. He had heard promises over telephone lines, across restaurant tables, and through the cracked windows of parked cars. Most threats were theater. A few had required funerals. None had arrived in the voice of his bookkeeper as she sat bleeding on a bathroom floor.

“It’s where they’re planning to kill you,” Ren repeated.

The words seemed to make the apartment smaller. Rain tapped the bathroom window, and the light above the mirror hummed as if there were a loose wire inside it. Emilio stood behind Richie with one hand near his coat. Richie lifted his own hand before Emilio could move.

“Get the medical kit from the car,” Richie said. “And call Dr. Vale. Nobody else.”

“Boss, we should move her.”

“We should keep her conscious.”

Emilio hesitated. It was a small hesitation, but Richie noticed. He had started noticing everything too late.

When Emilio left, Richie turned toward Ren. The towel was red along one edge. Her fingers had gone stiff with the effort of holding it in place.

“Tell me where you’re hurt.”

“My arm. I can still feel my hand.” She tried to laugh and failed. “That seemed important.”

“It is.”

“Then you should know I’m not telling you anything else until you promise not to put me in one of your safe houses.”

“You’re in no position to negotiate.”

“That's what the man who cut me said.”

Richie looked up sharply. Ren met his gaze without blinking. Under the harsh bathroom light, the discoloration near her jaw looked older than tonight. She had been carrying this story through his office for days while he worried about the seating chart at his engagement dinner.

“Fine,” he said. “No safe house without your agreement.”

“And no calling the police from my phone.”

“Why?”

“Because whoever did this already knew the number before I got it.”

He took a clean washcloth from a cabinet, pressed it gently over the towel, and asked her to keep pressure on the wound. He was no doctor, but he knew how quickly a person could fade from stubborn to silent.

“Now tell me about Margo.”

Ren closed her eyes briefly. “Your fiancée scheduled a toast that isn’t on the official program. Fourth toast. Eight forty tomorrow night. The guests who matter have been moved to the east ballroom. The people who aren't supposed to survive have been placed near the service doors.”

“Tomorrow night is the engagement dinner. The wedding is Friday.”

“I know what day it is, Richie.”

Hearing his first name in her voice startled him almost as much as the warning. At work she had always called him Mr. Romano, especially when they disagreed.

“Where did you see this?” he asked.

“Not in the seating chart. In the numbers.”

Of course. Ren had never trusted people as much as she trusted discrepancies. A missing seven dollars in a warehouse invoice could hold her attention longer than a man waving a gun.

She gestured weakly toward the front room. “Blue drive. Under the table, taped to the underside. Don’t touch the silver one. It's bait.”

Richie looked toward the doorway. Her apartment had resembled a temporary office because it was one. She had been living among evidence while he had been paying her a salary large enough to afford someplace better.

“Why here?” he asked.

“Because your company security checks the expensive neighborhoods. Nobody comes up three flights to ask why an accountant owns one plate.”

“Ren—”

“Focus. The dinner vendor received two separate deposits from a freight holding company in Biloxi. One appeared as catering. The other passed through a warehouse demolition contractor. Same authorized signatory, different shell corporations.”

“Whose signature?”

She stared at him. “Yours.”

Richie felt the first unmistakable turn of fear. He signed hundreds of documents in a month. His staff managed transfers, releases, payroll systems, leases. He had been careful about the violence, careless about the paper, and his entire empire rested on paper.

“I didn't authorize a demolition contractor.”

“I believe you,” she said. “I didn't at first.”

Footsteps sounded in the apartment. Richie turned, ready to block the doorway, but Emilio returned with a hard plastic case and an older man in a navy raincoat. Dr. Simon Vale had treated enough Romano employees to ask few questions and enough civilians to recognize when a line had been crossed.

“What happened?” the doctor asked.

“Someone attacked her,” Richie said. “She needs a hospital.”

Ren shook her head. “No hospital associated with Romano Holdings.”

Vale knelt, examined the injury, and set down his bag. “She needs stitches and monitoring. I know a private emergency clinic. It is not on his payroll.”

Richie looked at Ren. “Your choice.”

She considered him for a moment, then nodded.

Emilio went to clear the stairs. Once he was gone, Ren grabbed Richie's sleeve with her uninjured hand.

“Check his access records,” she whispered.

Richie kept his face still. “Emilio's?”

“Someone used his credentials to open the internal guest logistics file at two seventeen this morning. Could have been him. Could have been someone who borrowed them. I don't know.”

“Why didn't you come to me sooner?”

“Tuesday I tried. You were leaving with Margo. She asked me to come back after the fitting.”

He remembered. He remembered a woman standing beside a copy machine and a beautiful fiancée touching his arm and saying they were already late. He remembered choosing what felt urgent over what actually was.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Don't spend time being sorry. Spend it making sure I didn't bleed for nothing.”

They carried her down the stairs with the doctor beside her. Outside, the rain had turned colder. Emilio held the car door, but Richie caught his wrist before he could climb into the front seat.

“Who had your security token last night?”

“No one.”

“Think carefully.”

Emilio's expression changed. “It was in my coat. I left it at the club while they cleaned the dinner room. Why?”

“Because I need to know who touched it.”

The drive to the clinic took eleven minutes. Richie sat beside Ren, supporting her elbow while she watched the streetlights slip across the ceiling. Once, at a stoplight, she turned her head toward him.

“You keep looking at me like I turned into a stranger.”

“I keep wondering how much else I never saw.”

“Quite a lot,” she said.

At the clinic, Vale led her through a side entrance. Richie stayed behind the door while a nurse took Ren's blood pressure and guided her to a treatment room. When the nurse told him to wait outside, he obeyed. That obedience might have been the most unfamiliar thing he had done all week.

He called his chief legal adviser, Celia Voss. Celia answered immediately, though it was nearly midnight.

“Richard,” she said. “This better be important.”

“Freeze every vendor payment related to the Ferrante dinner. No explanation yet. Just stop the money.”

Celia went quiet. “That could embarrass Margo's father.”

“Then let him be embarrassed.”

“You're asking me to freeze accounts you personally signed off on.”

“That's why I pay you to read before I sign.”

After the call, he returned to Ren's apartment with Emilio. They entered through the back because someone had parked a dark sedan across from the entrance. The sedan pulled away as soon as Richie looked at it.

Inside, the apartment smelled of antiseptic and rain from their coats. Richie crawled beneath the folding table and peeled a strip of tape free. A blue thumb drive fell into his palm. He left the silver drive untouched.

Emilio stood near the window. “You think Margo's making a play?”

“I think Ren is telling the truth.”

“That's not the same thing.”

“No,” Richie said. “It isn't.”

He noticed something under the papers on the folding table: a grocery receipt with a handwritten note on the back. Ren's tiny precise lettering read, IF THEY SAY IT'S ABOUT TERRITORY, LOOK AT THE BENEFICIARIES.

He opened the laptop. A password prompt filled the screen. Below it, taped to the bezel, was a photograph no bigger than a postage stamp. A little girl stood on a pier beside a man wearing a faded baseball cap. The girl's front tooth was missing. The man held a ledger close to his chest as if it were a lunchbox.

It was the only photograph in the apartment.

Richie had been told Ren had no close family. Her personnel file named no emergency contact. The little girl looked like Ren, and the man looked enough like her to be her father.

Emilio peered over his shoulder. “You know him?”

Richie did not answer immediately.

The man in the photograph was Thomas Aldaine, a forensic auditor who had disappeared from the waterfront twelve years earlier. Richie's father had called him a thief. Four weeks later, a body had been found inside a burned-out car, and the case was closed without ceremony.

Richie remembered his father's words with a clarity that made his stomach turn: Some people should never learn where the money goes.

“Boss?” Emilio asked.

Richie turned the photograph over. On the back were five words, written in a careful adult hand.

THE FOURTH TOAST IS FOR THOMAS.

At the same instant, Ren's computer woke without anyone touching it. A message appeared on the screen.

YOU FOUND THE WRONG DRIVE, RICHARD.

Then every file on the desktop disappeared.