BILLIONAIRES CLUB

CHAPTER 7

Elliot read the text four times before he moved.

Julian Cross isn't your real name. I don't know what it is yet. But I will.

The elevator ride up to his apartment felt longer than it had any right to be. He kept the phone face-up in his palm the entire way, as if watching the screen might make the message rearrange itself into something less catastrophic.

Inside, he didn't turn on the lights. He crossed straight to the desk, opened the laptop, and pulled up the number the text had come from — already knowing, before the search even resolved, that it would trace to nothing. Reporters who dug into men like Marcus Thorne didn't text from numbers that led anywhere.

He typed a response three times and deleted it three times.

Who is this — too obvious, confirmed nothing, gave nothing.

Wrong number — she'd already proven she didn't believe easy answers.

We should talk — too much. Too fast. Too close to the truth he couldn't afford to hand her.

He set the phone down and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes instead, because four years of discipline had never once prepared him for the specific horror of being right. Maya Odein had looked at him for maybe ninety seconds at a party and pulled a thread that four billionaires, an entire federal case file, and Elliot's own carefully built identity had failed to fray.

His phone buzzed again. Reyes.

Call me. Now. We have a problem.

He was already dialing before he'd finished reading it.

"Tell me you don't already know," Reyes said, no greeting, voice tight in a way Elliot had heard maybe twice in four years.

"I know." Elliot sat on the edge of the desk, phone pressed hard to his ear. "She texted me an hour ago. Says she knows Julian Cross isn't real."

"She doesn't know that. She suspects it. There's a difference, and it's the only thing standing between you and a burned identity right now." A pause, papers shuffling somewhere on Reyes's end. "I pulled everything on her tonight. Maya Odein, thirty-one, freelance investigative journalist, three years digging into offshore finance and shell companies. No major outlet backing her — she works alone, which is either good news or very bad news depending on how this goes."

"Why bad news?"

"Because nobody's watching her back, Elliot. If Thorne's people decide she's a liability, there's no editor asking where she went. No paper running a story about a missing reporter. Just—" Reyes stopped himself, but the sentence finished itself anyway, in the space he left behind.

Just another disappearance nobody notices.

Elliot closed his eyes. "I need to warn her."

"You need to do no such thing." Reyes's voice snapped hard enough that Elliot pulled the phone an inch from his ear. "You warn her, you confirm every suspicion she has about you specifically, and you hand Simon Reeve the exact liability he's already looking for a reason to act on. You'd be signing both your names onto the same list."

"So I just let her keep walking toward them blind?"

"You let the Bureau handle it through channels that don't blow four years of work in one phone call." Reyes exhaled, and when he spoke again his voice had leveled out, back to the controlled calm Elliot depended on. "I can have someone reach out to her through normal press-protection channels. Anonymous tip, nothing traced to you. It won't stop her — women like her don't stop — but it might make her careful."

"Might."

"It's what we have." Reyes let that sit a beat. "Elliot. I know what this looks like to you. I know exactly what it looks like. But she is not Rachel, and you chasing that parallel is going to get you both killed instead of neither of you."

The name landed in the dark apartment like something dropped from a height. Reyes almost never said it out loud — some unspoken rule between them, a mercy neither had ever named directly.

Elliot didn't answer right away. Outside his window, the city carried on exactly as it had the night his sister stopped answering her phone — indifferent, glittering, entirely unaware that somewhere inside it, a woman who asked too many questions had just become someone's problem to solve.

"Fine," he said finally. "Your channels. Not mine."

"Good." Reyes didn't sound relieved so much as tired. "And Elliot — delete her number. Whatever burner she texted you from, block it, and don't engage again. If Simon's people are watching your phone the way they're watching hers, one reply is all it takes."

The call ended. Elliot sat in the dark a long moment, phone loose in his hand, Maya's message still glowing on the screen like something he couldn't quite make himself erase.

I don't know what it is yet. But I will.

He should have deleted it. He should have blocked the number the second Reyes told him to.

Instead he saved it — a single line of evidence that somewhere out there, someone else had started pulling on the same thread he'd spent four years afraid to pull too hard himself — and told himself, unconvincingly, that it was for the mission.

Not for her. Not because some part of him, however reckless, however against every rule he'd sworn to follow, wanted her to keep asking questions until one of them finally landed on the truth.

He put the phone down, finally, and didn't sleep.