Then he pointed respectfully toward Amelia.
“Not for her.”
Dominic studied Amelia for another moment.
Then he said, “Ten million.”
She blinked.
“What?”
“I said I would give you ten million dollars if you translated it.”
Amelia stared at him.
She had been so focused on the cipher that she had forgotten the joke entirely.
“That wasn’t a serious offer.”
“It became one when you opened the book.”
She shook her head instinctively.
“I can’t take ten million dollars for reading something.”
Dominic’s eyebrows rose.
Arthur looked as if this were the most incomprehensible sentence spoken all evening.
Dominic said, “You just prevented me from signing an agreement designed to strip control of a major supply route after my resources were committed.”
Amelia said nothing.
He continued.
“You exposed hidden operational instructions my own specialists missed.
And you did it while the man who wrote them was sitting ten feet away telling you to stop.”
He tapped the leather cover.
“That is not reading something.”
Amelia thought of medical bills stacked in drawers at her apartment.
Debts inherited from years she would rather not revisit.
Numbers that had shaped every shift she accepted, every purchase she postponed, every plan she abandoned.
Ten million dollars did not feel like money.
It felt fictional.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you’ll finish the translation.”
She looked at the journal.
That, at least, she understood.
“I’ll finish it.”
Dominic nodded.
“Then I’ll keep my word.”
Amelia spent the next several hours in the same private room, no longer standing against the wallpaper but seated at the mahogany table beside Arthur.
Together they worked through every page.
Arthur documented her translations while she explained repeated cipher structures.
The journal confirmed the pattern they had already uncovered.
The revised terms were designed to transfer leverage gradually toward Constantine’s Valarious network.
Duplicate manifests, substitution clauses and concealed contingency instructions gave his side options that Dominic’s side would never have knowingly accepted.
Nothing in the later pages contradicted Amelia’s first reading.
If anything, it made Constantine’s intentions clearer.
By dawn, the translation was complete.
Dominic returned to the room after several private conversations with Silas and Gabriel.
Amelia slid the final pages toward him.
“That’s everything.”
He read in silence.
Then he closed the folder Arthur had prepared around the translation.
“You were right.”
Amelia gave a tired nod.
Dominic looked at Arthur.
“Make sure she receives what I promised.”
Arthur hesitated only because the number still sounded absurd.
“The full amount?”
Dominic’s black eyes lifted.
“What part of ten million was unclear?”
