"Sit," Luca said, and dropped the ledger on the desk hard enough to make the lamp jump. "You said you could read numbers. Prove it."
I didn't sit. Not yet. "You dragged me out of bed for homework?"
"I dragged you out of bed because my accountant is either stupid or lying, and I need to know which before I decide what happens to him." He pushed a red pen across the leather blotter. It rolled and stopped against my knuckles. "Circle what doesn't add up."
"And if I find something you don't want found?"
"Then we'll both learn something about you." His mouth barely moved when he said it. That was the worst part. No smirk. Just fact.
I sat.
The numbers were dressed up nice — shell transfers, a laundry front on Halsted, invoices for equipment nobody ever delivered. Someone had worked hard to make the lies look bored. I uncapped the pen anyway. "Danny stays out of this. That was the deal."
"The deal was you sleep where I can see you and you keep my books honest. Your brother's debt doesn't disappear because you're annoyed with me, Nora."
"I'm not annoyed. I'm doing math in my pajamas at midnight for a man who threatened my brother's kneecaps."
"I threatened his life," Luca said, like I'd gotten the insult wrong and it bothered him. "Get it right."
I wanted to throw the pen at him. Instead I found the first hole in twelve seconds — a transfer dated a Sunday, routed through an account that didn't exist yet on the date it was supposedly used. I circled it in red, hard enough to tear the paper a little.
He leaned over my shoulder to look. Too close. I felt his jacket brush my arm, felt the heat coming off him like standing near an open oven, and I made myself keep breathing normal.
"Good eye," he said, low, right against my ear.
"Don't do that."
"Do what."
"Stand there like you're not doing anything."
"I'm reading over your shoulder. That's all this is." His hand landed on the back of my chair, not on me, but close enough that his knuckles grazed my spine through the thin cotton of the shirt I'd slept in — his shirt, technically, since mine were still packed in a box I hadn't been allowed to unpack yet. "Keep going."
Touch is not payment, I told myself. He hasn't paid for anything. Not with a hand on a chair.
I kept going. Found a second hole two pages later — a payroll line for a security detail of six men, paid like there were nine. I marked it. My hand wasn't as steady as I wanted it to be.
"You're shaking," he said.
"I'm cold."
"You're not cold. It's seventy-four degrees in here." He crouched then, so we were eye level, one hand braced on the arm of my chair, close enough that I could count the flecks of gray at the edge of his iris, close enough that if I moved an inch my mouth would land somewhere near his jaw. "You're scared of what you're about to find."
"I'm not scared of a ledger."
"Then finish it."
I turned the page instead of answering, because he was right and I hated that he was right, and there it was — the third page, the one that mattered. A loan marked settled two years ago, the same week my father's shop closed, the same week Danny signed for a debt that supposedly still existed. Paid. Already paid. Someone had kept billing a dead debt and my brother had been bleeding for a hole that had been filled a long time ago.
I put the pen down so I wouldn't stab something with it.
"This is paid," I said. "This debt. It says right here, closed two years ago. So what exactly is Danny paying you for right now?"
Luca didn't answer fast enough. That told me everything.
"Say it," I said. "Say it was never about the money."
"It was never about the money." He said it flat, no apology in it, which somehow made it worse. "It was about getting you in this house."
The air went out of the room. I stood up so fast the chair scraped the floor, and he didn't back away — he caught my wrist before I got two feet, not hard, just final, like a door shutting.
"You used my brother as bait."
"I used your brother as an excuse. There's a difference."
"Not to me."
"I know." His thumb moved once over the inside of my wrist, slow, deliberate, right over the pulse, and I hated that my pulse picked that exact second to slam. "You want to hit me. Go ahead."
"I want to leave."
"You signed a year."
"For a debt that was already paid."
"For a debt I told you existed. You didn't ask to see it before you signed, sweetheart. That's on you." He pulled me half a step closer, close enough that the red pen still in my other hand pressed flat between us, close enough I could feel his heartbeat through his shirt where my knuckles landed on his chest, and his voice dropped to something rougher. "But I'll tell you what's real. I'm not letting you walk out that door and pretend the last three pages didn't happen."
"Nothing happened."
"You found my dirt in nine minutes." His hand came up, not rough, just certain, tilting my jaw with two fingers so I had to look at him instead of the door. "Nobody's done that in five years. That's not nothing, Nora. That's the whole reason you're standing in my house right now."
His mouth was an inch from mine. I could feel his breath, could feel my own breath catching stupid and shallow, and my hand was still fisted in his shirt like I couldn't decide if I was pushing him away or holding him there.
"Let go of my wrist," I said, and it came out wrong — not steady, not the voice I wanted.
"Say you want me to."
I didn't get the chance to answer either way. The office door banged open without a knock, and one of his men stood there white as paper, phone already up and shaking in his hand.
"Boss. You need to see this. It's live. It's on every screen in the club right now — and it's got her name on it."