Harold turned the monitor toward Lucas, but Lucas did not look at the numbers first.
He looked at his head of security.
The man who had stood beside him through raids, funerals, hostile negotiations, and three attempts to fracture the Rourke organization was staring at the terminal as if it had just pronounced a sentence.
The little girl noticed too.
“Why does he look scared?” she asked.
No one answered.
The terminal chimed again.
Behind the private banking counter, another screen locked.
Then another.
Assistants stopped smiling.
Phones began ringing almost at once.
Lucas’s accountant stepped closer to the monitor.
“This is the continuity protocol.”
Lucas remembered the phrase.
Twelve years earlier, after Hannah Bennett saved his life, he had ordered his attorneys to create something she could use if his world ever reached hers.
He had refused to contact her directly.
He had refused to put his name on anything she might find.
Instead, three million dollars had been placed in a protected trust administered through Hancock Meridian.
It was not payment for saving him.
Hannah would have thrown that back in his face.
It was insurance against him.
If someone connected to the Rourke organization ever threatened, coerced, or financially damaged her, the trust could be activated without asking Lucas for permission.
The black card was the key.
Lucas had been told it was destroyed after Hannah refused the money.
He had believed that.
Now it sat in front of him.
Harold cleared his throat.
“Mr.
Rourke, there appears to be a discrepancy.”
“How much is left?” the girl asked.
The simplicity of the question cut through the room.
Harold looked at Lucas instead of her.
Lucas’s voice hardened.
“She asked you.”
Harold swallowed.
“Just over forty-one thousand dollars.”
The accountant stared at him.
“That’s impossible.”
Lucas did the arithmetic without moving his face.
Three million dollars, conservatively invested for twelve years, should have become more, not less.
He turned toward his accountant.
“Withdrawals?”
“Hundreds.”
The girl looked between the adults.
“Is forty-one thousand bad?”
Lucas crouched so that he was closer to her height.
“Your mother was supposed to have more.”
“How much?”
He paused.
“A lot more.”
She absorbed that with the grave concentration children sometimes had when adults finally stopped lying to them.
“Did she spend it?”
“No.”
The answer came from Lucas’s accountant.
He was scrolling through the audit trail now, his face tightening with every movement.
“These weren’t ordinary withdrawals.
