Chapter 7 #2
"LeBlanc, like the LeBlanc Foundation? Like the hospital system in Louisiana?
" She takes in a quick breath. "Because Obi-Wan is showing me a family trust structure that goes back to, OK wow, that goes back to the 1800s, and there's a Remington Arthur LeBlanc the First who basically built half of the Garden District, and a Remington the Second who was a surgeon, and then there's a gap where the third one just, what, evaporates from every public record, and that's you?
That's YOU? Because the digital footprint on Remy Black starts clean eight years ago, like suspiciously clean, like someone built it from scratch, and I should have caught that right away ago but the military records looked legitimate because they ARE legitimate, they're just filed under the wrong—"
"Vanessa." Kade's voice, low and level. Not a reprimand. A redirect.
She stops. Blinks. Pushes her pink-streaked hair behind her ear and takes a breath. "Right. OK. But I have like fourteen more questions."
They're taking me apart from different angles. I don't know which cuts deeper, Jax looking at me like I broke something or Vanessa connecting dots that lead to places I'm not ready for anyone to go.
I keep my hands gripped in my lap. "LeBlanc family.
Old money Louisiana. My father was a surgeon.
He died when I was eighteen. Then, when I was in my second year of medical school at Tulane, I discovered corruption in the family hospital and blew the whistle on everything.
Falsified drug trials, patient deaths covered up, pharmaceutical payoffs.
My grandfather chose the family name over the truth.
I was expelled, disowned, and blackballed from medicine in Louisiana. "
The room absorbs it.
"The name." Alina's notebook is still closed, but her eyes are sharp. "Why Black specifically?"
My mouth twitches. "LeBlanc means 'the white.' White as in clean, pure, the family name polished to a shine for two hundred years. Black felt like the opposite. Felt like the truth."
Something shifts behind Alina's eyes, there and gone.
Cole's stylus taps his tablet once. "The whistleblowing is verifiable through public record?"
"Sealed records, but yes. The investigation went federal before it was buried. My grandfather had enough political capital to make it disappear, but the records exist if you know where to look."
"I know where to look." Cole doesn't blink.
"The operational concern is exposure. If your sister used your full legal name at a social gathering attended by team members and their partners, the compartmentalization is functionally compromised.
The question is whether LeBlanc family connections create a traceable line back to CPG or NFS operations. "
"They don't." I say it with more certainty than I feel, because Cole doesn't need uncertainty right now.
He needs parameters. "Senior is dead. My mother has no involvement in the business side.
Landry runs the family company but has zero connection to anything in San Francisco.
The LeBlanc name opens doors in Louisiana. It doesn't open anything here."
Except the door to a senator's daughter who grew up in the LeBlanc orbit and is currently staying in your home.
Who is right now in your kitchen, probably barefoot again, probably with cayenne still under her nails from last night's roux, and you're standing in a secure room lying about connections while the biggest one makes coffee with your French press in the morning.
I shut it down. Lock it behind the same wall where I keep the hotel room and the sound she made when she said Tripp and the twenty-eight days of scanning crowds for dark hair that fell a certain way.
Cole nods once. "I'll run a full exposure assessment. Forty-eight hours."
Across the table, Mira hasn't moved. Her posture is the same controlled arrangement it's been since the meeting started, hands folded, watching, expression giving nothing. A trained nothing, the version that takes work to hold.
And I know because she's known for three months.
The night Sokolov came out at dinner, I recognized the name.
Old money knows old money, even across continents, and the Sokolovs disappearing from the society pages was exactly what my grandfather would have noted over bourbon.
I pulled her aside after and told her I remembered when it happened.
That I knew what it costs to walk away from a name like that.
She looked at me for a long time and said nothing. Three months of silence after.
Jax sees it.
I watch it happen in real time. His attention snagging on Mira's face, because Mira isn't surprised. Everyone else in this room is recalibrating, but Mira sits there like she already finished that math, and Jax is smart enough to know what that means.
"You knew." Jax's voice drops, and the hurt that was aimed at me pivots and finds a new target, and watching it happen feels like watching a bullet change trajectory mid-flight. "You KNEW. How long?"
Mira meets his eyes. Her chin lifts a fraction of an inch, and the movement is so controlled it's almost mechanical. "That is not the relevant question."
"The hell it isn't." The leg stops bouncing. Jax goes still in his chair, and Jax going still is the equivalent of Kade raising his voice, a thing that doesn't happen and changes the room when it does. "How long, Mira?"
"Three months." She says it without flinching, without reaching for him. Her accent stays exactly the same. "He asked me not to tell anyone, and I understood why. That is the relevant information."
Jax's jaw works. His eyes cut to me, then back to her, then to the table.
I've watched him do this a hundred times.
It's the moment a plan goes sideways and he has to decide whether to stabilize or cut his losses.
His partner and his brother, both holding the same secret, and he's the one who didn't know.
This is what it costs.
"Wait. Hold on." Xander unfolds his arms and leans forward, sounding like a man who just added something up and doesn't like the total. "LeBlanc. The Garden District LeBlancs. Like, your grandmother probably has a portrait hall and a seat on every board in Orleans Parish."
"She has a rosary and a crossword puzzle addiction."
"Saint." Xander points at me with one thick finger. "I have seen you eat gas station boudin at two in the morning."
"It was good boudin."
"Your family built a hospital wing. You've got a building with your name on it and you ate boudin out of a Styrofoam box in my truck.
" He shakes his head, and the sound he makes is somewhere between a laugh and a groan, and it opens a crack in the room's atmosphere that lets something other than accusation circulate.
Asher's stylus pauses mid-rotation and Damian lifts his coffee. "So you're old money and you still drink the shit they brew on B3." He takes a sip of his own. "That's the real crime here."
Kade hasn't spoken.
He's been standing at the head of the table through all of it, arms folded. He hasn't reacted. And that's the loudest thing in the room, because everyone here knows that Kade doesn't react to information he's already processed.
His eyes meet mine across the length of the table. He gives me nothing. No nod, no reassurance, no judgment.
I hold his gaze and I don't look away because looking away would mean I'm asking for something, and I'm not.
I'm standing in a room full of people who now know my real name, and the floor hasn't opened up and the walls haven't closed in and the man at the head of the table is still standing where he always stands.
Chairs push back. Laptops close. Jax leaves first. Doesn't look at me. Doesn't look at Mira. Just stands and walks out, and the silence he leaves behind is so wrong on him that it fills the space where his voice should be.
I wait until the room has emptied except for Kade. He's still at the head of the table, and I'm still at the far end, and the distance between us is twelve chairs and four years of trust that just got tested from a direction neither of us planned for.
"Kade."
He unfolds his arms. Looks at me. Waits.
"Thank you for not—" I stop. The sentence doesn't have a clean ending, and he knows why I stopped, and I know he knows, and that's enough.
"Handle Jax," Kade says. Two words. He turns and walks out, and the conference room door closes behind him with a soft click that sounds like the period at the end of a very long sentence.
I stand in the empty room and let the quiet settle. The fluorescents hum overhead, flat and colorless. Roman's photograph watches from the wall. The coffee someone left on the table is now cold.
The compartments lost a wall today. Saint and Tripp exist in the same room now, known by the same people, and I can't patch the hole because Darcy's voice put it there. Darcy is the one person I've never been able to build a wall against.
My phone buzzes. Darcy's name on the screen, followed by a wall of text with zero punctuation.
OK SO the beignet place was mid at best Jax owes me an apology but the farmers market was incredible and Evie found andouille AND tasso and she's making jambalaya tonight and she says you need to be home by seven because the rice takes forty-five minutes and she's not reheating it for you
I read it twice. The word home sits in the middle of the message like a nail I keep stepping on.
My townhouse has a packed bag in the hallway and bare walls and a fridge that my sister correctly identified as a cry for help. It's not home. It's never been home. It's a place I sleep that happens to have good plumbing and a rooftop garden I can't stop tending.
But Evie is in the kitchen making jambalaya with andouille she found at a farmers market, and the house I built to leave easily is filling up with sounds and smells and people who aren't leaving.
Seven o'clock. Rice takes forty-five minutes. She's not reheating it.
I pocket the phone and walk toward the elevator.