Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 35: Hell Part 2

Diana drove away from her grandmother's residence at half past three with the specific, uncomfortable freight of a woman who has had a conversation that she cannot immediately file into an existing category, and the additional freight of knowing that Marcus had stood in that doorway and heard her call him a criminal.

She was four traffic lights from the villa when her phone buzzed on the center console.

She glanced at the screen.

Banking alert. Morrison Accounting Group operating account.

She picked it up at the next red light.

The number was there. Clean and specific and undeniable. Another wire transfer, processed that afternoon, from her corporate account.

Made out to Marcus Hayes.

Eighty thousand dollars.

Diana sat at the red light until the car behind her signaled.

He was in the kitchen when she came through the door.

Of course he was. He was always in the kitchen, or the garden, or somewhere in the villa with the easy, domestic presence of a man who had nowhere more important to be, and under ordinary circumstances she had found this quality irritating in a manageable, abstract way.

Right now it produced something considerably less abstract.

She came through the kitchen doorway and stopped and looked at him for a single, charged second — the compressed, final second before a wire under tension reaches its limit — and then she put her phone on the counter between them with the screen facing up.

The notification was still visible.

Marcus looked at it.

She watched his expression — watched the moment his eyes read the number, registered what it was, and understood the context — and she read nothing on his face that looked like guilt. What she read looked like the focused, rapid-processing attention of a man encountering a problem and beginning to dismantle it.

Which was, she noted, exactly what a sophisticated thief would also look like.

"Eighty thousand," she said. Her voice was very quiet. The kind of quiet that is the last register before something louder. "This afternoon. While you were at my grandmother's house, apparently conducting a favor for the family." The irony of the last phrase landed with its full weight. "Two withdrawals in three days. Both in your name. Both from my corporate account." She looked at him directly. "I want the money back. Both amounts. Total of two hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Transferred back to the Morrison Accounting Group account by end of business tomorrow."

Marcus looked at the phone.

"Diana —"

"End of business tomorrow," she said.

"I didn't —"

"I know what you're going to say," she said, and the controlled quiet of her voice developed the first visible edge. "I know you're going to tell me you didn't do it and someone put your name on it and I should call the bank and run a trace." She took one step forward. "I have heard that speech. I am not interested in hearing it again." Another step. "What I am interested in is two hundred and thirty thousand dollars back in my account by tomorrow, and if that does not happen —" she stopped, close enough now that he would have to work to look anywhere else, and looked at him with the full, unfiltered force of everything she had been containing since the first notification — "I will make your life in this house so small and so difficult that whatever you thought you were getting from this arrangement will seem laughable in comparison."

The kitchen was completely still.

"I will show you," Diana said, very quietly, "exactly what hell looks like when I'm the one building it."

Marcus held her gaze.

His expression was composed. Controlled. The specific, structural composure of a man who has heard something that moved through him and has decided what to do about it.

He reached into his jacket pocket.

He put his own phone on the counter beside hers.

"Look at my accounts," he said. "All of them. Look at every transaction I've made since the day I walked into this house. Look at my incoming deposits and my outgoing transfers and every number associated with every account I own." His voice was level and direct. "You will not find two hundred and thirty thousand dollars of your money. You will not find one dollar of your money."

Diana looked at the phone.

"Then where," she said, "is it going?"

"That," Marcus said quietly, "is the right question."