Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
I paused as if I was considering her offer of twenty-five percent. I couldn’t let her think I’d caved too easily. “Agreed,” I said.
Sterling sat back down at the table, pulled the spiral-bound notebook and pen toward her, and began to write. I made out the date and the beginning of a sentence before she scribbled it out and started over on a fresh sheet. I waited, growing more curious by the second.
Finally, she said, “Read this. I’m not a lawyer, but it should be good enough. If I find the money, I get twenty-five percent of what’s in the account. If it leads to multiple accounts, I get twenty-five percent of the total. If it leads to a combination of cash, securities, or other goods, I get twenty-five percent of the total value.”
I read through what she had written up, signed, and pushed it back to her with the pen. Sterling signed and took a picture of the contract with her phone. Business concluded, she pushed her phone aside and picked up the little statue of Vitellius.
“You know the key to break the code,” I guessed.
Her eyes flashed up to me, and for just a second, I caught the real Sterling through the guarded mask she wore. There she was, so alive, that sharp brain firing behind eyes so blue they made the summer sky seem faded. It was a Sterling I’d only caught sight of in our last days together a year ago, a Sterling I longed for.
A heartbeat later, the mask came down like blinds dropping, and her eyes flicked back to the statue. “Mhm,” she said.
Confirmation? Denial? I couldn’t tell.
She picked up the statue, turning it in her hands. Gently, she set it down on its base and pressed her thumbs to the edges of one of the brass medallions. I wasn’t expecting to see it turn a quarter rotation and quietly click into a new position. I stared down at the statue. I’d handled that thing for more hours than I could count, wondering what the hell my father had been up to, what he wanted me to see, and I’d never felt the medallions move.
Sterling turned the statue, staring at it, lost in thought, reaching slowly before her fingers settled against the next brass medallion, and she turned it in the opposite direction. This time, it rotated halfway around before clicking into place. The third medallion turned almost all the way around before I heard the click. The final medallion didn’t turn at all.
With a single press of Sterling’s finger, that medallion sank several millimeters into the base before popping open like a tiny door. Sterling ignored my indrawn breath. I didn’t know what I expected to see inside. A secret compartment, maybe? But the marble behind the medallion was indented only slightly, revealing more numbers and letters, these far bigger than those engraved on the base. The alphanumeric string was arranged above and below a line, like the longest fraction I’d ever seen.
Sterling grabbed the spiral-bound notebook and roughly turned from our signed contract to a fresh page. Picking up the pen, she copied the long fraction onto the top of the page. Once she had it, she closed the medallion, picked up the statue, and looked at me, her eyes on my shoulder, avoiding mine.
“Hold this up so I can see the base,” she ordered.
I did, holding the statue under the light while she used the small magnifying glass and painstakingly copied the alphanumeric string onto the pad in front of her. Whatever she was looking for, I didn’t see it. A massive fraction that couldn’t be a fraction. A long string of numbers and letters that wasn’t an account number. But Sterling very clearly knew exactly what it was.
I watched in fascination as her teeth bit into her perfectly curved pink lip, her eyes flicking back and forth, the pen moving up and down, drawing lines in the air above the paper. Tapping one number, then a letter. Matching. Scribbling something out. Shaking her head. Crossing it out with slashes of dark blue ink and trying again. More scratching out.
Sterling let out a huff of breath, the pen bobbing up and down in her fingers as she stared at the mess of numbers and notes in front of her. What did she see that I didn’t see?
I had no doubt that she was on to something. There was a lot more to Sterling than most people guessed. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever met. It was the eyes that got me first. So alive, like blue flame. Every inch of her body was perfection, her hair long, golden waves, her soft skin glowing with warmth even in the winter. She had dazzled me at first sight so much that I’d missed the rest—how intelligent she was and funny, sometimes veering into brash. How deeply she loved. And I hadn’t known until far too late that she was wounded and vulnerable and not nearly as guarded against a man like me as I’d assumed she would be.