Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 36: Trojan PART 1

Marcus looked at the phone on the counter.

Then he looked at Diana.

Then he looked at the phone again, and something moved across his expression that was not quite the composed patience she had come to expect from him — something with more texture in it, the specific quality of a man encountering a situation whose internal logic he has assessed and found wanting.

Eighty thousand dollars.

He had spent the morning authenticating a four-hundred-year-old painting and dealing with eight hired men in a warehouse, had declined a f*e from Elizabeth Steel that would have been significant by any reasonable standard, and had driven home to find a banking notification waiting on his wife's phone accusing him of stealing a sum that would not have registered as a rounding error on his smallest account.

The timing was not subtle.

The construction was not sophisticated.

What it was, was effective — because it was aimed at a woman who had already decided what she thought of him, and effective didn't require sophisticated when the audience was already prepared to believe.

"Someone is setting me up," Marcus said.

Diana looked at him.

"I know," she said. "That's what you keep saying."

"Because it keeps being true."

"Or," Diana said, with the flat, precise enunciation of a woman who has considered this exact response and prepared for it, "you keep saying it because it is the only available defense for someone who has been caught twice and needs a narrative that doesn't end with them returning money they've spent."

Marcus looked at her for a moment.

"Think about the sequence," he said.

"I have thought about —"

"Think about it again." He kept his voice even. Patient. The tone of a man walking someone through an argument he needs them to follow without resistance. "This morning, Elizabeth Steel offered to pay me for work I did for your family. I turned it down. That happened in front of you." He let that sit. "Three hours later, I've apparently stolen eighty thousand dollars from your corporate account." He tilted his head slightly. "That's the sequence. A man who turns down legitimate payment from a wealthy woman in the morning and then steals a fraction of that amount from his wife's company in the afternoon."

Diana opened her mouth.

"Who does that?" Marcus asked.

She closed it.

The kitchen was quiet for a moment.

"Someone who is greedy and poorly organized," she said. "Someone who doesn't think clearly about optics because they're not accustomed to being scrutinized."

"Or," Marcus said, "someone who didn't do it."

Diana crossed her arms.

"You know what I think?" she said, and her voice took on the specific quality it used when she was about to say something she had been holding for longer than this conversation. "I think you are a very clever man who has constructed a very specific public image — the man who turns down money, the man who doesn't need anything, the man who signs humiliating contracts without complaint — and I think that image is designed to make exactly this kind of accusation seem impossible." She looked at him directly. "Which makes you either innocent or considerably more strategic than you look."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive," Marcus said.

"No," Diana agreed. "They're not." Something shifted in her expression — a brief, internal conflict that resolved itself back into the cold certainty she had arrived with. "But the money is gone and your name is on the transfers and I don't have another suspect, which means until I do, you remain the most likely explanation."

"And the contract?" Marcus said. "The divorce you'd file if the public optics were different?"

Diana's jaw tightened.

"If it weren't for the binding nature of that contract," she said, and each word was deliberate and chosen and placed with care, "and if it weren't for the absolute humiliation of having to explain publicly that I manufactured a marriage and had it collapse in under a year — I would have dissolved this arrangement already." She held his gaze. "You should know that."

The kitchen received this.

Marcus received it.

He was quiet for a moment — the specific, internal quiet of a man absorbing something and deciding what to build with it.

"Trust me," he said.