The Mafia Boss Laughed at a Little Girl — Until Her Dog Proved She Was Right
Chapter 8
Viktor studied her — this small, stubborn girl who had walked into his warehouse three days ago as a stranger and had already, in the span of a single terrible night, saved his son’s life at the cost of everything she loved. “Explain,” he said.
“If they want what’s in my head,” Ivy said slowly, working through the logic even as she spoke it aloud, “then killing me before they get it doesn’t help them. They need me alive long enough to talk. That means the actual danger isn’t tonight. It’s whenever they decide they’re ready to take me somewhere quiet and controlled to extract it properly.”
Marcus nodded, something like reluctant admiration crossing his face. “She’s not wrong. The consortium doesn’t waste assets. If they wanted her simply dead, they would have used considerably less subtlety than sending me first.”
“So we use that,” Ivy continued. “We don’t hide. We make the evidence public before they ever get the chance to extract anything from me at all. If the numbers are already out, in the hands of people who can act on them, there’s no reason left to come after me.”
Viktor’s expression shifted, calculating. “You’d need to remember the sequence exactly. Recite it to someone who could actually verify and use it — regulators, journalists, someone with the resources to move against an organization this size without simply being bought or buried.”
“I know someone,” Marcus said quietly. “A financial crimes investigator named Priya Anand. She’s spent three years building a case against exactly this kind of consortium activity, working mostly alone because no agency wanted to touch something this size without ironclad proof. She’d know how to verify Anna’s numbers, and she’d know how to get them into enough hands, fast enough, that killing the source afterward wouldn’t undo the damage.”
“You trust her?” Viktor asked.
“I trust that she’s spent three years being ignored by everyone with the power to act, which means she’ll move the moment someone finally hands her something real,” Marcus said. “That’s not the same as trust. But it’s close enough for tonight.”
They reached Priya Anand’s cramped, over-cluttered office above a shuttered accountancy firm just before dawn, Viktor’s remaining men securing the perimeter while Marcus made the introduction. Priya, a sharp-eyed woman in her forties who had clearly not slept properly in longer than she’d admit, listened to the full account with a stillness that suggested she’d been waiting years for exactly this knock at her door.
“Say it,” she told Ivy gently, once the recorder was running and the explanation finished. “Whatever your mother taught you. Start from the beginning, and don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense to you. It doesn’t need to make sense to you. It only needs to make sense to the numbers underneath it.”
Ivy closed her eyes and recited the lullaby her mother had sung to her every night for years before the fire, a simple, repetitive melody about a little bird counting stars, numbers folded so naturally into the rhythm that Ivy herself had never once suspected they were anything other than a child’s bedtime song. Priya’s hands moved rapidly across her keyboard as she spoke, translating rhythm into digits, digits into account numbers, routing codes, dates, names.
By the time Ivy finished, Priya sat back slowly, staring at the screen with an expression somewhere between horror and vindication. “This is it,” she said quietly. “This is everything. Every account, every transfer, every shell company they’ve used for a decade. Your mother built the entire skeleton key to bring this whole network down, and she hid it inside a lullaby simple enough that a six-year-old could carry it without ever knowing what she was carrying.”
“Can you use it?” Viktor asked.
“I can do considerably better than use it,” Priya said, already reaching for her phone. “I’ve spent three years building the case that goes around this evidence. What I never had was the evidence itself. I have contacts at three separate regulatory bodies and two investigative outlets who have been waiting exactly as long as I have for someone to finally hand them something they can’t ignore or bury. Give me six hours.”