Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 37: Arrested Part 1

Diana snatched the phone back.

The motion was sharp and definitive, the physical equivalent of closing a door — she pulled it from his hand and held it against her chest and looked at him with an expression that had relocated itself back to its default setting, the one that didn't admit uncertainty or recalibration or any of the things that had been briefly visible in the space between his explanation and right now.

"That," she said, "is the most elaborate deflection I've heard in a long time."

"It's not a deflection," Marcus said.

"You just showed me a line of code on my own phone and told me someone hacked it." She looked at him with the flat, precise skepticism of a woman who had built a career on reading numbers and people and finding where they didn't add up.

"I am the CEO of an accounting firm. I have an IT infrastructure that costs my company a significant amount annually specifically to prevent exactly the kind of compromise you're describing. My devices run enterprise-grade security. The authorization protocols on my banking access alone have three-layer verification." She tilted her head slightly. "And your explanation is that someone bypassed all of that to steal money and put your name on it."

"Yes," Marcus said.

"That's impossible."

"Your security is good," Marcus said. He kept his voice even and factual, the tone he used when he was not arguing but simply stating. "It's genuinely good. Better than most. But good security slows sophisticated attacks — it doesn't make them impossible. The right tools and the right access point bypass most enterprise security without triggering the alerts it's designed to generate."

Diana looked at him.

"And you know this," she said, "because."

"Because I've worked in environments where understanding how security fails is more important than understanding how it works," Marcus said simply.

"Security consultant," Diana said, with the precise, flat intonation she used for phrases she found inadequate.

"Yes."

She turned away slightly — not leaving, but repositioning, the movement of a woman reorganizing her thinking without wanting to do it in direct eyeline. She looked at the counter. She looked at the banking notification still visible on her screen.

"Even if I entertained this," she said, and the word entertained carried all the weight she intended it to, "even if I granted you the theoretical possibility that someone hacked my phone — which I don't — you still haven't explained why your name is on the transfers."

"Because whoever did this needed a name," Marcus said. "They needed someone in this household, someone with a plausible motive, someone Diana Morrison would immediately believe was capable of stealing from her." He paused. "I was the obvious choice."

Diana looked at the notification again.

Something moved through her expression — not visible enough to be called a crack, but present, the internal registration of a logic problem that had developed a dimension she hadn't accounted for.

"After the first withdrawal," Marcus said, "what did you do?"

She looked at him. "What?"

"The first transfer. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. After that happened — what did you do about your account security?"

Diana's jaw tightened slightly. "I changed the credentials. Login, authorization codes, everything."

"Everything," Marcus said.

"Everything."

"And then the second transfer happened," Marcus said.

The kitchen was quiet.

Diana stood with the phone in her hand and looked at a point slightly past Marcus's left shoulder and did the thing she was best at, which was following a line of logic wherever it led regardless of whether she liked the destination.

She had changed the credentials.

All of them. She had done it herself, from her laptop, in her office, the morning after Sophie had come to her door with the first notification. New passwords, new authorization codes, new security questions. She had been thorough. She had documented it.

And three days later, eighty thousand dollars had moved from the same account.

Using credentials that shouldn't have been accessible to anyone who had only had access to the first set.

Unless.

Unless the access wasn't to the credentials themselves. Unless it was to the device she used to create the new credentials. Unless every keystroke she had typed — including the new passwords, the new codes, the new authorizations — had been captured in real time as she typed them.

She looked at the phone in her hand.

She thought about her laptop. She thought about the café she went to every Tuesday and Thursday morning to work before the office filled up.

She thought about two weeks ago.

The man she hadn't looked at, two tables over.

She hadn't looked at him because there had been no reason to look at him.

"Diana." Marcus's voice was quiet. He had watched the calculation move across her face and was giving it the space to arrive. "How long have you been using the same café on Tuesday mornings?"

She looked at him sharply.

"Two years," she said.

"Public wifi?"

She said nothing.

The silence was its own answer.