Chapter 10
TEN
Rowan
I woke up to a silence that didn't scream.
For the first time since the stadium, my mind wasn't a cacophony of breaking glass and social media notifications. The panic attack that had nearly eaten me alive in the study had been brutally, methodically evicted.
Mateo was still there. He was sitting in the armchair by the door, watching me with the unblinking stillness of a gargoyle perched on a cathedral.
"Status?" he asked, his voice a low gravel that vibrated in the quiet room.
I sat up. My body felt heavy, unused to the strange sensation of genuine rest, but my thoughts were razor-sharp. The fog was gone. The hysteria was gone. In its place was a cold, crystalline anger.
"Operational," I said. My voice was raspy.
I pushed the duvet back. I didn't feel the need to cover myself, though I reached for the clothes I’d set out for myself as pajamas the day before, soft joggers and a cashmere sweater. I dressed with efficiency.
"The laptop," I said, smoothing the cashmere down. "I need it back."
Mateo studied me. He was looking for the tremor in my hands. He was looking for the shallow breathing of a prey animal.
He wouldn't find it. The orgasms hadn't just grounded me; they had reminded me that I was a physical object in a physical world, not just a digital target.
"Kitchen," he said, standing up. "Juno made coffee. Stephen is reviewing something over my pay grade."
I walked past him. I didn't run. I didn't scurry. I walked with the heel-strike of a woman crossing a boardroom, even though I was barefoot.
We gathered in the dining area. It was a vast, open space dominated by a table made of reclaimed wood that looked almost heavy enough to survive a bomb blast.
Stephen was typing furiously at one end. Juno was leaning against the kitchen island, nursing a mug of tea.
They stopped when I entered.
"The ghost returns," Juno murmured, his eyes tracking my movement. He slid a mug across the counter toward me. "Black. Like your soul."
"My soul is currently under audit," I noted, taking the coffee. I didn't sip it. I carried it to the table and set it down next to Stephen.
"Stephen, can you move please?” I asked, trying to tower over him, though even at my full height I probably wasn’t very impressive.
He blinked, looking up over the rim of his silver glasses. "Excuse me?"
"You're in my seat. That puts the monitor at a bad angle for the glare."
A corner of Stephen's mouth twitched. He picked up his laptop and moved one seat to the left without a word. His monitor now had some glare from the window on it and I could tell that he was thinking of a way to fix that already.
I sat down. I opened my laptop.
The spreadsheet was still there, exactly where I’d left it before Mateo carried me out of the mini-office I’d set up last night. The numbers, the shell companies, the labyrinth of Vance’s empire. Before, it had looked like a wall. Now, it looked like a diagram.
"We’ve been looking at the money," I said, my fingers hovering over the keys. "We tracked the flow from the compliance fines to Aegis Collective Solutions. We proved he’s stealing from his clients."
"It's a solid fraud case," Stephen agreed, leaning back. "But fraud takes five years to litigate. By the time we get a discovery order, Vance will have liquidated the assets and moved to a non-extradition country."
"Exactly," I said. "Fraud is a white-collar crime. It’s polite. We need something visceral."
I minimized the spreadsheet and opened a new tab. I started pulling up media kits.
"Vance is a producer," I said, typing furiously. "He doesn't have power; he has leverage. He holds the keys to the venues, the distribution deals, the playlists. But leverage requires legitimacy."
I pulled up a graph I’d built in my head while staring at the ceiling of the hotel room three days ago.
"Who gives him the legitimacy?" I asked the room.
"The board," Mateo grunted from the shadows.
"The board cares about dividends," I countered. "They don't care about the optics unless the stock drops."
I pulled up a photo. It wasn't a banker. It wasn't a lawyer.
It was a man with a silver fox aesthetic, a jaw like a ship’s prow, and a smile that looked like it cost ten thousand pounds.
Hendrick Warson.
"Warson," Juno said, his tone darkening. "He owns the Warson Global Media. And almost every lifestyle magazine in the UK."
"He owns the narrative," I corrected.
I started drawing lines on the screen, connecting entities.
"Look at the timeline. Every time Vance introduces a more restrictive rider, like the cycle-tracking clause last year, what happens in the press two weeks prior?"
I pulled up a series of news articles, each in their own tab, to make my point. All I really needed was the headlines though.
THE UNSTABLE OMEGA: Why Biology Needs Management.
ARTISTS IN CRISIS: The Dangers of Unchecked Heats.
SAFETY FIRST: Why Productions Are Choosing Compliance.
"Warson runs the fear campaign," I said. "He primes the public to believe that Omegas are ticking time bombs and that managers who enforce these draconian rules are heroes protecting the tour."
I looked up at them.
"Vance is the cage," I said. "But Hendrick Warson is the one convincing the bird it’s safer inside."
The silence in the room was heavy.
"Warson is a kingmaker," Stephen said softly. "He has dinner with the Prime Minister. If Vance is a shark, Warson is the ocean. He provides the environment."
"So we poison the water," I said.
I tapped the screen.
"We don't go after the money. We go after the legitimacy. We prove that Warson isn't just reporting on the industry; he’s invested in it. If we can link Warson’s private equity fund to Aegis Collective Solutions..."
"Then every article he’s ever printed about 'Wellness' becomes a conflict of interest," Stephen finished. "It becomes market manipulation."
"It becomes a conspiracy," I said.
Stephen pushed his glasses up his nose. "If we target Warson, we aren't just fighting a record label, Rowan. We are fighting the ink."
"We'll be creating enemies who buy ink by the barrel," Juno added, his amber eyes narrowing. "They will stop writing about your incompetence and start writing about your mental health. They will dig up your ex-boyfriends. They will find that parking ticket you didn't pay in 2012."
"I don't have parking tickets," I said absently, pulling up the shareholder registry for Warson Global Media. "I take public transport."
"The point stands," Juno said. "You go public with this, and the scrutiny shifts from 'scandal' to 'dissection.' We’ve kept you in the shadows, Rowan. We extracted you. If you dismantle Warson, you have to stand in the light."
"Physical security becomes a nightmare," Mateo added.
He moved to the table, placing his heavy hands on the wood, looking down at the map I was building.
"Warson has private security that makes Vance’s scouts look like mall cops.
If we poke this bear, the threat level goes from 'harassment' to 'elimination. '"
"Can you hold the perimeter?" I asked Mateo, not looking away from the data.
"I can hold a perimeter against God himself if the check clears," Mateo rumbled. "But I can't stop a sniper if you insist on standing on a podium."
"I'm not standing on a podium," I muttered, cross-referencing a shell company address. "I'm standing on a data set."
I reached for a stack of printed documents Stephen had left on the corner of the table. I spread them out, ignoring the coffee stains. I grabbed a red marker.
I began to draw.
It was a physical map of the corruption. I circled Aegis. I drew a line to Vance Global. I drew a dotted line to Warson Global Media.
Then I paused.
There was a gap. A missing link between the money and the press.
I stared at the paper. My mind worked the way it always did, stripping away the noise, looking for the quiet administrative error that unraveled everything.
Consulting fees.
I drew a circle in the empty space.
The Aurelius Foundation.
"It's a charity," I whispered. "Vance donates to Warson’s charity. Warson’s charity pays 'consulting fees' back to Vance’s shell company. It’s a tax-free loop."
I drew the final line. The circle closed. It was a perfect, self-sustaining engine of exploitation.
I felt a gaze on me. Heavy. Intelligent.
I looked up.
Stephen was watching me. He was leaning forward in his chair, his chin resting on his hand, ignoring his own laptop entirely. He was watching the red marker in my hand like it was a conductor's baton. There was a hunger in his eyes that had nothing to do with the settling of lawsuits.
"You skipped the shell corporations in the Caymans," Stephen said quietly.
"They're a distraction," I replied, recapping the marker with a sharp snap. "Standard tax avoidance. It’s boring. The charity is the structural weakness."
Stephen let out a breath. He shook his head slightly, a small, incredulous smile playing on his lips.
"Most people can't see the connections this quickly," he said. "It usually takes a forensic accounting team six weeks to find a loop like that."
I looked at the diagram. It seemed obvious to me. It was just a flowchart of greed.
"Most people are either overworked or aren't very good at their jobs," I replied flatly.
Stephen laughed.
It wasn't the polite, dry chuckle I had heard in the car. This was a genuine, startled sound that cracked his aristocratic veneer wide open. It was the sound of a man discovering something new that he found delightful.
The sound made the hair on my arms stand up. It was warmer than the fire in the next room.
"I'm starting to see why Vance was terrified of you," Stephen said, his grey eyes locked on mine. "He thought you were reading the riders. He didn't realize you were auditing his soul."
"Vance doesn't have a soul," I said, smoothing the paper. "He has a profit margin. And I just found the decimal point."
I looked around the table.
Juno was grinning, that shark-like expression that meant he smelled blood in the water. Mateo looked grim, but he was already checking the sight lines of the windows, accepting the escalation. Stephen looked like he wanted to frame the diagram and hang it over his bed.
"We hit Hendrick," I said. "We discredit the voice, and without the media coverage, Vance’s contracts look like what they are, trafficking documents. The investors will panic. The system destabilizes."
"It's the nuclear option," Stephen noted. "If we miss, Warson buries us under libel suits for the next century."
"We won't miss," I said. "Because we aren't going to sue him for libel. We're going to sue him for racketeering."
I pushed the diagram into the center of the table.
"Are we in?"
Juno picked up the paper. "Hitting the press baron? It's suicidal. It's elegant." He looked at me. "I'm in."
"Security protocols double," Mateo said. "No one leaves the house without a two-man detail. But if you want to hurt them... this hurts them."
Stephen reached out. He touched the red line I had drawn connecting the charity to the shell company.
"I'll start drafting the complaint," he said.
"Good," I said.
I closed my laptop. My hands were steady. The silence in my head was total.
"Let's go hunting."