Someone inside. Not a low-level watcher selling information for cash. Someone with access to family dinners, security briefings, and the details that only people close to me would know.
I call Lex at dawn. My office. Door closed.
"Run the communications. Every person who had access to operational information in the last six weeks. Signal intelligence. Phone records. Financial transactions. Cross-reference against Viktor's known movements."
Lex doesn't react. His face is the face he wears for everything: stone, patient, already calculating.
"Everyone?"
"Everyone."
"Everyone includes family friends."
The question is careful. Deliberate. Lex has already done his own math.
"Everyone means everyone."
He nods once. Leaves. Two days of work: the kind that happens in spreadsheets and cell tower logs rather than warehouses. Methodical. Patient. The tedious labor of intelligence that no one romanticizes because it looks like a man in front of a laptop cross-referencing phone records at 3am.
Day thirty-seven. Lex comes back with a file.
He sets it on my desk and sits across from me and waits. The file is thin. The evidence is not.
A burner phone. Prepaid. Purchased with cash at a convenience store in Brookline. The phone pings exclusively from cell towers near one location: Elena Drakos's apartment on Commonwealth Avenue.
Call records. Outgoing calls to a number registered to a shell company that Lex has traced through three layers of corporateinsulation to an account associated with Viktor Reznikov's communications network. The calls sync. Every time I shared security information at a family dinner — the penthouse guard rotation, the alliance meeting schedule, the Elysium event security plan — within hours, Viktor adjusted his operations. The pattern is clean. Precise. Undeniable.
The dinner. Chapter eleven of my life with Siobhan. Elena at our table, warm and gracious, laughing at stories about my brothers. She asked about the security protocols at the penthouse. Casual. Concerned."My father worries."
I answered without hesitation because distrust requires suspicion and suspicion requires a reason and Elena had never given me one.
"How long?" I ask.
"Since before the wedding." Lex's voice is quiet. He delivers devastating information the way he delivers everything: with economy. "The first call was placed two days after you announced the marriage. Since you chose Siobhan over her."
I stare at the file. Elena. My childhood friend. The woman who congratulated me with a gracious smile. Who befriended my wife. Who held Siobhan's hand at a restaurant and asked "are you alright?" with what looked like genuine concern. Who helped her choose a wedding dress and smoothed the fabric at her shoulders and said "surviving beautifully" and meant it as both comfort and reconnaissance.
My first instinct: kill her. Clean. Quick. The way I handle threats that endanger what I protect.
My second: she's been close to Siobhan for weeks. Lunches. Conversations. The restaurant where Siobhan came out of the bathroom looking pale and Elena noticed. "Bad oyster."
What else did she see? What else did she report?
"Bring her in."
Not arrested. Invited. A car, a polite request, the courtesy extended to someone who grew up in my house even as the evidence of her betrayal sits on my desk.
She arrives composed. Of course she does. Elena Drakos has been composed since the night I said Siobhan O'Brien's name instead of hers and the humiliation landed on her like a blade, and she swallowed it whole without a single person in that room noticing the wound.
She sits in the chair across from my desk.
The chair. The one Siobhan sat in thirty-seven days ago when she crossed her legs and said "bullshit" and negotiated terms that redefined my life. Two women in the same chair. One negotiating for a marriage. One about to negotiate for something else entirely.
I lay out the evidence. The burner phone. The call records. The pattern.
Elena listens. Her hands rest in her lap. Her posture doesn't change. When I finish, the silence between us is the silence of two people who grew up in this world together and understand exactly what this conversation means.
She doesn't deny it.