Step Aside, I'm the King of Capital novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Face I Hired

"You're Mr. S," I said to the mirror, "because I paid you to be."

Sullivan laughed, and it was a good laugh, the one I'd bought.

"You paid me to smile, Tris. I do the smiling. I did the stage. I did six years of dinners with men who wouldn't have taken your call."

"They wouldn't have taken a twenty-five-year-old's call."

"And now they'll take mine." He fixed his tie. "I told the board in Singapore last month that you left the firm. A junior analyst with a grudge. Nobody asked for proof."

"They'll ask for it."

"They'll ask for the man they've seen." He turned from the sink and looked at me properly. "Twenty percent of the carry and the name, and you go home rich and quiet."

"No."

"Then go home poor and quiet."

He walked out, straightening his cuffs.

I took out my phone with a hand that wasn't quite steady and opened the Halden Row portal.

The screen turned blue.

ACCESS REVOKED, it said. CONTACT YOUR ADMINISTRATOR.

I was the administrator.

I stood in a marble room and understood that I had been locked out of my own house.

Emerson found me on the chapel steps.

"You were gone twenty minutes," she said. "I thought you'd left."

"I'm not going to leave."

"Then let's go home." She was gripping her car keys so hard that her knuckles were white. "I can't talk to one more person who knew her."

I drove.

Neither of us said a word in the elevator.

The apartment was quiet and the river was grey in the windows.

She shut the door, put her back against it and looked at me.

"I'm so angry," she said.

"At who?"

"At everyone. At my uncle. At the woman with your ring. At that smug man with the envelope." Her voice cracked on the last word. "At her, for dying."

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