Chapter 11 Emptied Out #2
"I don't know yet. That's what Ronan's been trying to find out.
" Matteo's expression stayed steady, but something in his posture had shifted, protective in a way that had nothing to do with strategy anymore.
"I have people looking at the distributor's full financial history right now.
If this connects back further than four days, we'll find it. "
"We."
"You didn't think I was going to sit on this information a second time, did you?" Something almost like a smile crossed his face, brief, humorless. "I made that mistake once. I have no intention of repeating it."
Del studied him a long moment, the fury from twenty minutes ago cooling into something more useful, sharper, and found, uncomfortably, that she believed him.
Not because he'd earned it through charm or performance, but because everything about the last five minutes, the immediate admission on the warehouse, the flat acknowledgment of the mistake on Sorin, the complete absence of any attempt to talk his way out of accountability, matched the version of him she'd started trusting somewhere around a fabricated health inspection at four in the morning weeks ago.
"I need my payroll solved by Friday," she said. "That's not negotiable. Whatever this Sorin situation actually is, I have forty employees who don't care about a laundering operation, they care about rent."
"I can cover it."
"Absolutely not."
"Del."
"I am not taking a loan from the man I'm currently in a hostile business war with, regardless of what else has happened between us.
" Her voice came out harder than she intended, though the edge in it had shifted from anger at him to something closer to determination.
"I'll pull from operating capital. It'll hurt the supplier side for a month, but it's survivable, and it means I don't owe you anything beyond what I already can't fully categorize. "
Something in his expression suggested he wanted to argue further and decided, visibly, not to.
"Then let me help with the other part instead.
Sorin. I have resources you don't, contacts in this district who owe me favors, and a legitimate stake now in figuring out how deep this actually runs, since it's already cost your business real money and my patience. "
Del weighed it, standing in the middle of an office that had felt, a month ago, like enemy territory, and now felt like something considerably harder to name. "Information sharing. Not partnership. Not merger. I keep full control of my own club and my own decisions."
"Agreed."
"And you tell me everything the moment you learn it. No more four day delays because you were protecting a theory."
"Agreed." He said it without hesitation, direct in a way that matched the same honesty he'd brought to the warehouse admission twenty minutes ago, and something in Del's chest loosened slightly, not trust exactly, not yet, but the first real foundation for something that might eventually become it.
"I'll have Ronan pull together everything we have by end of day.
You should bring your nephew in on it too.
If Sorin's got access inside your operation, Nico's the one who'll spot the anomaly fastest."
"He already flagged the payroll drain within ten minutes of it happening."
"Good. I want him in the room."
Del nodded, slow, and looked at Matteo standing across from her in his own office, both of them on the same side of a problem for the first time since she'd walked into her own club a month ago and found him sitting uninvited in her chair.
It felt strange, standing here without the familiar architecture of the war between them, strange and uncomfortable and, underneath both of those things, something that felt disturbingly close to relief.
"This doesn't mean I trust you," she said.
"I know."
"It means I trust the math. You admitting to the warehouse and denying the payroll makes more sense than you doing both."
"That's fair."
"And the second you give me a reason to think you're lying about any of this, the alliance ends, and I go back to treating you exactly like the threat I met a month ago."
"I'd expect nothing less." Something in his voice carried genuine respect rather than concession, and Del found herself holding his gaze a beat longer than the conversation strictly required, the same charged silence that had been building between them for weeks settling back into the room now that the immediate crisis had a shape, even if the shape was considerably more dangerous than either of them had understood an hour ago.
"I need to get back," she said. "Payroll doesn't fix itself."
"I'll have Ronan call Nico within the hour."
She turned toward the door, and stopped, hand on the frame, the same way he had a month ago walking out of her office for the first time. "Matteo."
"Yeah."
"If this Sorin situation is bigger than either of us understands yet, I need to know you're not going to use it as leverage the second it's convenient for you."
Something in his expression went very still, very serious. "I've had a hundred opportunities to use leverage against you in the last month, Del. I haven't used a single one that actually mattered. I'm not going to start now, with something that could genuinely hurt you."
She held his gaze another moment, searching for the lie she half expected to find and not finding it, and left without further argument, because Nico was waiting and payroll wasn't going to solve itself and she had exactly three days to figure out how to keep forty employees paid while somewhere beneath both their operations, a man neither of them had met yet was quietly working to take apart everything they'd both built.
She didn't know yet how deep it ran.
She was about to find out.