Chapter 15 Never Fully Hers
By midnight Del's eyes had stopped focusing on the numbers and started seeing shapes instead, columns blurring into gray static every time she blinked too long, and she kept going anyway, because stopping meant admitting she was looking for something she was afraid to find.
"Del." Nico's voice, careful, from across the desk. "You should eat something."
"I'm fine."
"You've said that every hour since six."
"I'm still fine." She pulled the next folder toward her, year two, the flood year, the year she'd bailed water with a literal bucket at three in the morning and still opened on schedule. "Keep going. Every transaction, every wire, cross reference against invoiced clients."
They'd been at it for six hours. Nico had built a spreadsheet that tracked every incoming transfer against a matching client record, flagging anything without a clean paper trail, and the flags had started small, a discrepancy here, a rounding error there, nothing that couldn't be explained by a business run on hustle and spreadsheets instead of professional accountants.
Then they'd hit year one.
"Del."
Something in Nico's voice made her look up fast, and she watched him turn his laptop toward her with the particular stillness of a man who'd just found exactly what neither of them had wanted to find.
"Fifteen thousand, wired in March of year one, sender V.
Sorin. No invoice." Nico's finger traced down the screen.
"But it's not the only one. There's a second wire in June, eight thousand, same sender code, buried under a memo line that just says loan repayment.
And a third in September, twelve thousand, listed as consulting fee. "
"That's thirty five thousand dollars."
"In year one alone." Nico's jaw was tight, his voice flat in the way it got when he was working hard to keep panic out of it.
"I checked further back than the wire transfer Matteo flagged.
This wasn't a one time thing. It's a pattern, Del.
Regular, recurring, spread out just enough that it never triggered anything, because you were drowning that year and every dollar looked like a miracle instead of a red flag. "
Del stared at the screen, the numbers refusing to rearrange themselves into anything less devastating no matter how many times her eyes moved across them. "Keep going."
"Del."
"Keep going, Nico."
He kept going. Year two showed four more transfers, smaller, more carefully disguised, one routed through what looked like a legitimate supplier rebate that Nico traced back, after twenty minutes of digging, to the same offshore account.
Year three showed fewer, the money slowing as Marea's own revenue started climbing, but never fully stopping, a steady undercurrent running beneath every quarter Del had ever believed she'd built entirely with her own hands.
"There's more," Nico said, quieter now. "It's not just money."
Del's stomach dropped. "What do you mean?"
"Staffing records. There's a pattern in our kitchen and cleaning crew turnover that I never flagged before because high turnover's normal in this industry.
But cross referenced against Sorin's known associates, three names that worked here for exactly six to eight weeks each, over the last four years, match aliases my contact's been tracking since this investigation started.
" Nico looked up at her, and something in his expression told her the rest before he said it out loud.
"I think people moved through this building, Del.
Through our staffing pipeline. I think Sorin used Marea's own hiring practices as cover. "
The room tilted, briefly, and Del gripped the edge of her desk hard enough that her knuckles went white.
It had never been fully hers. Not once. Not from the very first dollar.
"Sorin funded the club from the beginning," she said, the words coming out flat, mechanical, the only way she could get them out at all.
"He watched me struggle in year one and stepped in quiet enough that I thought it was luck.
He kept it going just enough to keep me afloat, and he used my hiring practices to move people through this building for four years, and I never once suspected because I was too busy being proud of myself for surviving. "
"You didn't know."
"That doesn't matter." Her voice cracked, finally, the composure she'd been holding since six in the morning giving way all at once.
"I built a whole identity on this, Nico.
Self-made. Nobody's charity case. I told Matteo, I told everyone, that I clawed this out of nothing with my own two hands, and it was never true.
Someone was always underneath it, using me, and I was too grateful to be surviving to ever look underneath the floor I was standing on. "
"Del."
"I need a minute."
Nico stood, hesitated, clearly torn between staying and giving her the space she was asking for, and Del made the decision for him, standing abruptly and walking into the small private bathroom off her office, locking the door behind her with hands that had finally started shaking after six hours of forcing them steady.
She looked at herself in the mirror. Same face.
Same eyes. A woman who'd spent eleven years believing a story about herself that had never been entirely true, and she let the grief come, finally, silently, gripping the edge of the sink and letting her shoulders shake through it without sound, because some part of her, even now, refused to let Nico hear her break.
She gave herself exactly four minutes.
Then she washed her face, looked at herself again, and made a decision she recognized as the only one available to her.
Grief could wait. It would still be there later, whenever she had time to actually sit with what this meant about the last eleven years of her life.
Right now, Sorin had used her club to move product and possibly people for four years, and he was still out there, probably unaware his money trail had just been fully exposed, and every minute she spent grieving was a minute he had to notice something had changed.
She opened the door. Nico looked up fast, worry written plain across his face.
"You okay?"
"No." Del sat back down, pulled the laptop toward her, and forced her voice into something steadier than she felt.
"But I don't have time to be okay right now.
I need everything you've found compiled into one file.
Every wire, every staffing anomaly, every name that connects back to Sorin.
I want it clean enough that when I hand it to Matteo, there's no ambiguity left in any of it. "
"You're calling him."
"I'm calling him." She already had her phone in hand, thumb hovering over his name. "This isn't a business update anymore, Nico. This is a man who's been laundering money and possibly trafficking people through my building for four years, and I want him found before he realizes what we know."
Nico nodded, already turning back to his laptop, fingers moving fast across the keys, and Del pressed call before she could second guess the decision, phone to her ear, listening to it ring once before Matteo picked up.
"Del."
"I need you here." Her voice came out steadier than she'd expected, cold and clear, the particular calm that arrived once grief had burned off and left something harder underneath it.
"Nico confirmed everything. Multiple wires, going back to year one, thirty five thousand in the first year alone.
And it's not just money. There's a pattern in our staffing turnover that matches known Sorin associates.
He's been moving people through this building, Matteo. For four years."
Silence on the other end, brief, and when Matteo spoke again his voice had gone flat and dangerous in a register she hadn't heard from him before. "I'm coming now."
"You don't have to."
"I'm coming, Del."
He hung up before she could argue further, and Del set the phone down on her desk, exhaling hard, watching Nico's fingers still moving across his keyboard, compiling the file that would confirm everything she'd spent the last six hours refusing to fully believe.
Matteo arrived nineteen minutes later, faster than the drive from Obsidian should have allowed, and Del heard him coming before she saw him, footsteps fast and hard through the empty club, no hesitation in them at all.
He came through her office door still in the clothes he'd probably been wearing all day, tie gone, sleeves shoved up, and the second he saw her face he crossed the room without a word and pulled her out of her chair into his arms.
She didn't resist. She let him hold her for a few seconds, his grip hard enough to leave an ache, before she pulled back and straightened, done needing it.
"Tell me everything," he said, pulling back just enough to look at her.
Nico turned his laptop around, and walked Matteo through it fast, methodical, the same forensic breakdown he'd just given Del an hour ago, and Del watched Matteo's expression harden with every new detail, the staffing anomalies, the recurring wires, the pattern spanning four years that neither of them had ever suspected.
"He's been running this under both our noses," Matteo said finally, voice cold, controlled in the particular way that told Del he was already three moves into planning a response.
"Using your club for cover, using my district's blind spots, probably counting on both of us being too focused on each other to ever look at the actual threat sitting underneath us. "
"I want him found."
"He will be."
"I don't want him found and handled quietly, Matteo.
I want him to know exactly who took him down and why.
" Del's voice came out hard, certain, the grief from an hour ago fully buried now under something considerably more useful.
"He used my club. My employees. My hiring practices, to move people through this building like cargo, and I refuse to let that be a footnote in someone else's story about how they eventually caught him. "
Matteo studied her for a long moment, something shifting behind his eyes that looked, uncomfortably, like genuine respect layered over real anger. "Then we take him down together. My resources, your information. Nobody manages you out of this."
"Good."
Del held his gaze, the last of her composure settling into something steadier.
"Fine," she said. "But this ends when I say it ends, and I want him alive when we find him. I have questions only he can answer."
Nico cleared his throat from across the desk, deliberately breaking the moment. "I hate to interrupt whatever this is, but Sorin doesn't know we've made him yet. If we move carefully, we might have a window before he realizes his cover's blown."
"How long?" Matteo said.
"Days, maybe less, if he's got anyone watching the accounts we just pulled records from." Nico's expression stayed grim. "We need to move fast."
Matteo looked at Del, something unspoken passing between them, the particular understanding of two people who'd spent a month circling each other through war and attraction and now, finally, stood fully on the same side of something that actually mattered.
"Then we move fast," he said. "Starting tonight."
Del nodded, and felt the last traces of the woman who'd broken down alone in her own bathroom an hour ago fold themselves away, replaced by something harder, colder, entirely focused on the man who'd spent four years using her own success as camouflage for something she still didn't fully understand the size of.