It was Denny, in the end, who gave it away, though he never meant to.
Ren went back to Nassar's office the following week, back to the same corner table, the same stack of ordinary receipts. He didn't ask about the folder again. Asking would have told Denny exactly what Ren wanted to know, and Ren had already learned enough about this world to understand that the surest way to get a door shut was to knock on it too loudly.
Instead he waited, and he listened, the way he'd always been good at listening, and eventually the office gave up its secrets the way offices always do: through the small, careless talk of people who've stopped noticing who else is in the room.
"Aldis wants the whole ledger clean by month's end," Denny said to Nassar one afternoon, not bothering to lower his voice, since as far as he knew there was only a fifteen-year-old clerk in the corner who couldn't possibly understand what any of it meant. "Every account Voss rigged, recalculated at fair rates. He says he wants it done before anyone outside the operation starts asking questions."
"He's worried about the debts, or about how they'll make him look?" Nassar asked, not quite hiding his amusement.
"Does it matter? Man wants to walk into this business looking like he's better than his uncle was. Cheaper to fix a few ledgers than to fix a reputation once people already hate you."
Nassar made a small sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Ambitious for someone who hasn't even been confirmed yet."
"He will be. Nobody else wants the headache."
Ren kept his eyes on his receipts and his pen moving, adding numbers that no longer meant anything to him, because his whole attention had narrowed down to that one exchange. Corin Aldis wasn't fixing the ledgers out of guilt. He was fixing them because a cleaner set of books made a cleaner story, and a man about to inherit an empire built on rigged debts needed people to believe he was nothing like the man who'd built it.
It didn't make Aldis better. It made him smarter, which, Ren was beginning to understand, was often more dangerous.
He almost missed the next part, distracted as he was, and only caught it because Denny said a name he hadn't heard before.
"Anyway, Mira's already halfway through the west district accounts. She'll have Voss's whole book sorted before Aldis even asks twice."
"She's fast," Nassar said. "Fast and careful. Rare combination."
"Faster than fast. I've never seen anyone catch errors the way she does. Aldis is lucky he found her before someone else did."
Ren didn't ask who Mira was. He didn't need to. Someone else out there was doing exactly what he'd stumbled into doing by accident, reading numbers the way most people read faces, except she was doing it deliberately, for the man now inheriting the very operation that owned Ren's family. She was already inside in a way Ren had only just started to be. She already had Aldis's trust.
For a strange, uncomfortable moment, Ren felt something close to admiration twist together with something closer to dread. Whoever Mira was, she was good enough that even Nassar, a man who didn't waste praise easily, spoke about her like she was worth paying attention to.
He wondered, not for the first time that week, whether the same instinct that had made him useful to Nassar might one day make him a problem for someone like her, or her a problem for him.
He finished the afternoon's receipts without another word, and walked home with two new facts sitting heavier in his chest than anything he'd carried out of that office before. Aldis was cleaning up the debts for his own reasons, not out of any fairness Ren could count on lasting. And somewhere across the city, a girl he'd never met was already better positioned inside this world than he was, working for the very man who would decide, eventually, what happened to every family still caught in Voss's old web.
His family included.
Ren didn't know yet whether Mira would ever become someone he had to face directly, or just a name he heard secondhand from men who didn't know he was listening. But some part of him, the same part that had spent weeks turning his father's ruined loan over and over until it made sense, was already starting to run the numbers on her too. Not the way she added figures. The way people like her tended to move through a world like this: quickly, carefully, and always, eventually, in the way of anyone who happened to be standing in the same narrow space they wanted for themselves.
He didn't know yet if that space was going to be Ren's.
But he intended to find out.