Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 31: Thief PART 2

Not recklessly — Diana Morrison did not do things recklessly, even when she was furious — but with the compressed, forward-leaning energy of someone who has been holding a significant amount of directed anger at a specific temperature for forty-five minutes and is now eight minutes from the target.

The villa's front drive was empty when she pulled in.

She went inside and stood in the entrance hall and waited with the particular, contained stillness of someone who has decided exactly how this conversation is going to begin and is simply waiting for the other participant to arrive.

She heard his car at four fifty-three.

The front door opened. Marcus came through it in his jacket and his worn gray suit, carrying nothing, with the unhurried composure of a man returning from an ordinary afternoon. When he saw her standing in the entrance hall his expression shifted — the slight, brief opening that happened when he wasn't entirely prepared for her to be there, the closest thing to unguarded she had ever seen on his face.

Something in it — she couldn't name it precisely, it was too quick — looked, for just a fraction of a second, like it might have been glad to see her.

Then he read the room.

"Diana —"

"One hundred and fifty thousand dollars," Diana said.

The words came out with the flat, precise weight of a formal charge.

Marcus looked at her.

"My corporate account," she said. "Withdrawn this morning. Wired to you." She stepped forward once, closing the distance between them to the range where she could make sure he understood she meant every syllable. "You are a thief."

The word landed in the entrance hall and stayed there.

Marcus held her gaze with an expression she couldn't read — not the familiar composed patience, something different, something more alert, working through something rapidly behind his eyes.

"I didn't take money from your account," he said.

"The wire transfer says otherwise."

"Then the wire transfer is wrong," Marcus said, and his voice had a quality in it that was different from the usual evenness — not defensive, not wounded, but focused in the specific, forward way of someone who has just received a piece of information and recognized immediately that it is a symptom of something larger.

"My bank doesn't make errors on wire transfers," Diana said. "One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Your name on the authorization. Explain that."

"I can't explain a transaction I didn't make," Marcus said.

"Then explain why your name is on it."

"Because someone put it there," Marcus said.

Diana looked at him.

"That," she said, and the contempt in her voice was precise and controlled, "is the most convenient answer I have ever heard. Someone put it there." She tilted her head slightly. "Do you know how many times I have sat across from men who stole from their employers, their clients, their families, and used exactly that framing? Someone put it there. I don't know how that happened. Someone must have used my information." She shook her head once, sharply. "You were brought into this house with nothing. You signed a contract that gave you access to resources and spaces you would not otherwise have access to. And now money is leaving my corporate account with your name attached to it and your explanation is that someone else did it."

"Yes," Marcus said simply.

"Give me back my money," Diana said.

"I don't have your money."

"Marcus —"

"Diana." His voice was quiet and completely level. "I did not take one hundred and fifty thousand dollars from your account. I have never accessed your accounts. I don't need your money." He looked at her steadily. "What I need you to do is call your bank and request a full trace on the transaction — origin point, authentication method, IP address used for the authorization. Do that before you say anything else."

The entrance hall was very quiet.

Diana looked at him.

At the worn gray suit. At the composed, direct face. At the man who had turned down a hundred million dollars in a ballroom without blinking and was now standing in front of her accused of stealing a hundred and fifty thousand and asking her to check the IP address.

She didn't know what to do with any of that.

"Give me back my money," she said again, because it was the only sentence she had arrived with and she was not ready to replace it with a different one yet.

Marcus looked at her for a moment longer.

Then he said, very quietly, "Call the bank."

And he walked past her toward the kitchen.