Chapter 26
twenty-six
Evie
"Forty-eight hours before the subcommittee reconvenes, which gives us a window but not a wide one." Kade's voice fills the briefing room like cold water in a glass, steady and even and leaving no space for anything else. "Vanessa, where are we on the offshore accounts?"
"Three confirmed, two probable, and one that's giving Obi-Wan a migraine.
" Vanessa's fingers move across her tablet without looking down.
"The Cayman structure mirrors the one Saint flagged in the medical facility records, but the routing is cleaner.
Whoever built this learned from the first iteration. "
My handwriting is on the center screen.
I notice it every time my eyes drift from whoever's speaking, which is often because there are nine people in this room and they talk in a language I'm still learning to parse.
The annotations are mine, donor names in my print, connection lines in blue ink that Vanessa digitized and mapped to locations I've never heard of and two I have, because I processed the wire transfers myself.
The briefing room is cold. Screens line every wall, data streaming in columns, maps, financial trees that branch into something organic and wrong. The interactive table surface glows faintly under my forearms.
"And the enforcer." Cole glances at Kade. "Vanessa pulled the thread last night."
Vanessa swipes her tablet, and a man's face fills a side screen. Late forties, severe mouth, eyes that don't track the camera. The kind of stillness you only get from training.
"Viktor Kazakov. Former KGB, counterintelligence.
Transitioned to private military after the Soviet collapse, ran a Russian unit through the early Chechen operations.
Lost the entire unit to a betrayal he survived alone.
He's been on contract work for six years.
" Her cursor moves across his profile. "Six years aligns with our network expansion timeline. "
"He's the apparent organizational head," Kade says. "Manages day-to-day operations, runs the enforcement structure, takes the disciplinary calls. Until we have more, Kazakov is the apex we can name."
Kazakov. I file the name the way I'd file a donor receipt, the same automatic motion my father trained into me. The face on the screen doesn't look familiar. I would remember a man with eyes that don't move.
"The disbursement pattern Vanessa surfaced lines up with the trafficking intake Saint pulled from the Tenderloin clinic.
" Cole leans forward, one finger tracing a timeline on the table display.
"If Blanchard's PAC contributions align with Kazakov's logistics calendar, we've got a supply chain on political tempo. "
"They do." Remy's voice changes.
Not the words. The register. The easy warmth drops away, a command I've never heard from him.
"Quarterly contributions spike within two weeks of documented intake surges. The sedative procurement follows the same cycle, lagging six to ten days."
My thighs press together under the table.
The reaction is immediate and has nothing to do with the content of what he's saying.
My body doesn't know the difference between this room and his bedroom at two in the morning, between a briefing and his mouth against my ear telling me what to do.
I cross my legs and my pulse thuds between them and I stay still, watching the screen.
Of course this is what my body does. He's standing in a room helping dismantle my father's trafficking network, and I'm clenching under a conference table. The senator's daughter has excellent priorities.
Not now. Not here.
"For Evangeline." Kade's gaze moves to me, holds for exactly one second. "You'll hear callsigns in this room. We use them on coms and keep using them in briefings so the muscle memory holds. Remy is Saint. You'll pick up the rest by context."
He doesn't wait for me to nod.
"Saint. Walk us through the medical supply chain."
Saint.
The name moves through me strangely. I've heard Darcy call him Tripp.
I've called him Remy, Remington, whispered the name he was born with against his skin.
But this one is new, belongs to this room and these people, to a version of him I've never met.
The man Kade just called doesn't cook gumbo or press his face into my hair at night.
This man builds cases and plans operations and speaks in a voice that makes my body clench under a conference table surrounded by nine people who would absolutely notice if I stopped breathing.
I uncross my legs. Cross them the other way.
Remy stands and moves to the main screen, pulling up the pharmaceutical distribution map with two quick gestures. His shoulders are straight, and when he turns to face the room his eyes pass over me the same way they pass over everyone else.
Except they don't. Not quite. A half-second longer. A degree warmer.
Nobody catches it. I think.
"The facility I infiltrated is one node." A map blooms across the main screen, red dots spreading like an infection. "Coordinated NFS field teams are running parallel threads in Los Angeles and Berlin, with probable field sites in S?o Paulo and Bangkok."
My arms cross over my chest. My fingers grip the fabric of my sleeves, pressing into the muscle underneath, and the cold from the room seeps through the thin cotton of my blouse.
I tell myself it's the temperature. My body knows better.
The chill started when Remy said quarterly contributions in the same tone my father uses for constituent outreach, and it hasn't stopped.
"Berlin site mirrors the San Francisco model.
" Cole's fingers move across the table display, pulling financial threads into a web that tightens as he speaks.
"Legitimate medical front, trafficking intake underneath, pharmaceutical supply chain running parallel.
The structure is identical, which means someone designed a template and distributed it. "
"Franchised evil." Jax spins a pen between his fingers without looking at it. "Very scalable. Very on-brand."
Nobody laughs, but nobody flinches either. Xander tilts his chair back and folds his arms across his massive chest, nodding like Jax just described a problematic building foundation instead of an international trafficking network.
"Damian." Kade doesn't raise his voice. Doesn't need to. "The extraction site has one remaining problem. A security contractor who saw Saint's face. He can't be in a position to talk when the subcommittee window opens."
Damian pushes off the wall where he's been standing so still I'd almost forgotten he was there. His pale gray eyes move once across the room, tracking something I can't, and then he nods.
"Understood."
He leaves. The briefing room door shuts with a soft click, and the conversation continues without a single beat of hesitation. Cole is already pulling up the next data set. Vanessa mutters to her tablet. Jax's pen keeps spinning.
Can't be in a position to talk. One person. A man who saw Remy's face. A man just left this room to make sure that becomes past tense. He said understood the same way I'd confirm a catering order, and not a single person at this table looked up from their screen.
"For anyone who needs the orientation." Kade's gaze moves to me, holds for a beat, and moves on. "NFS operates on contract. Highest bidder with the hardest problem. We don't touch children, civilians, or trafficking supply chains, which is why this case sits where it does."
Remy leans forward, both hands flat on the table.
My breath catches. The last time those hands were on me was weeks ago, before the eight days of silence in the guest room, before he came home from a meeting in this room and named what my father is.
The memory arrives without warning and without mercy, settling between my thighs with a heat that has no business existing in a room this cold.
I don't shift my weight. I don't uncross my arms. The wet is already there, has been there since he opened his mouth and became someone I haven't met yet, and I hold perfectly still because the senator's daughter knows how to sit in a room full of powerful men and betray nothing.
Both things live in my body at the same time. The hands that touched me weeks ago and the hands that are building a case to destroy my father. Neither cancels the other. Neither wins.
"Evangeline." Cole sounds like a man who's already three moves ahead and wants to know if I can keep up.
"Pacific Future Initiative. Filed incorporation papers in Delaware seven years ago.
Your father's name doesn't appear on those documents.
Yours does, on two of them. And you processed wire transfers to PFI through the foundation. Walk us through the routing."
My arms uncross. I lean forward, forearms settling against the table's cool surface, and somewhere between Cole's question and my first breath, a pen materializes in my right hand. I don't remember picking it up.
"The contributions came through the foundation's general operating account, coded to bypass the normal reconciliation review.
" The words come fast and clean, shaped by three years of processing these transactions.
"Quarterly reporting only. No individual line-item review.
Coding that doesn't get questioned unless someone is looking for it. "
Cole's eyebrows lift a fraction. "You noticed the anomaly."
"I flagged it three years ago." My grip tightens on the pen. "My father told me it was a legacy structure from before the foundation's accounting migration and to leave it alone. I left it alone."
I don't soften it.
"You had the front door key this whole time," Vanessa says, looking up from her tablet.
"I had a key I didn't know fit the lock." A beat. "And I didn't bother asking what door."
"How many donors follow that pattern?" Kade asks. "Contributions calibrated to reporting thresholds."