Chapter 26 #2
"Seven that I can confirm." I'm already counting them, faces and names surfacing from three years of donor receptions, quarterly reports, handshakes I gave without understanding what I was shaking on.
"The Whitfields, the Heberts, Andrew Choi through his family trust. A Political Action Committee called Civic Progress Alliance out of Shreveport.
And two individual donors who always contribute within forty-eight hours of each other.
Paul Renaud and someone named Liang. They're paired.
Every quarter, same week, amounts that mirror each other within a few hundred dollars. "
Vanessa's fingers fly across her tablet. "Renaud and Liang are both signatories on a joint venture LLC that feeds into the same Cayman structure." She looks up. "She's right. They're paired."
"That's not a donor base." Cole traces the connections on the table display as I name them, and the web tightens in real time. "That's a distribution network using philanthropic cover."
"My father called every one of them a 'legacy commitment' when I asked. Same phrase, same tone, six times in three years." I tap the pen against the table once, twice, a rhythm I don't control. "Each time I heard it, I asked fewer questions the next round. By year three I wasn't asking at all."
The room is quiet for exactly two seconds.
"Holy shit." Xander's chair drops forward onto all four legs with a thud that breaks the silence clean in half. "You've got the whole donor network mapped in your head like a goddamn search index."
Remy's eyes cut to Xander. The look is fast, sharp, nothing to do with operational security. Xander catches it and holds both hands up, palms out, grinning.
"Compliment, bro. That was a compliment."
"Then compliment quieter." Asher doesn't look up from his screen, and the line is so dry it takes a beat to register as humor.
Thirty minutes in, I've worked through the rest of it.
Renaud once, in person, silver hair, an accent I couldn't place, twenty minutes with my father in a corner and no one else for the rest of the evening.
Liang, never met. The chief of staff who lied to my face about Liang being a corporate entity instead of a person.
Wei Liang on Vanessa's tablet, naturalized citizen, import-export business in Houston, registered agent shared with two Cayman shells.
The Whitfield seating preferences across three fundraisers.
The Choi family trust contribution dates that always landed in the second week of a quarterly cycle.
Vanessa keeps pace with me, cross-referencing in real time, and the picture sharpens with every name.
"So Evangeline's inside knowledge confirms the financial layout, and Vanessa's data confirms the downstream connections." Cole sits back. "We have convergence."
"What about the benefit next month?" Kade's question is directed at me. "The one Winchester invited you to. Guest list overlap with any of these names?"
"I don't have the guest list yet." The pen stops moving. "Margaret said she'd send it this week. It hasn't come through."
"Then we move on the assumption you'll get it." Kade doesn't pause. "Asher, counter-surveillance on the Foundation office before her next meeting. Margaret reads clean per Cole's pull last week. We're not assuming her office does."
The silence that follows has a different texture than the one before. Not thicker. Deliberate.
"That's the edge of what I know." I set the pen down flat on the table, and the click carries in the silent room.
"Everything I've told you, I had access to.
Everything beyond the foundation's books, my father kept in rooms I wasn't invited into.
I can tell you where my access stopped. I can't tell you what's on the other side of that wall. "
Remy watches me from across the table. His eyes have weight. The room is full of people watching me and I only feel his. I don't look at him because looking at him in this room would undo something I'm not ready to undo.
"The wall itself is useful," Cole says. "What Blanchard hid from his own daughter tells us what he considered most dangerous to expose."
Vanessa swipes onto the main screen, and a guest list fills the wall in high resolution.
I typed that list.
The font is mine. Not the typeface. The formatting.
Alphabetical by last name with dietary restrictions in parentheses and seating assignments color-coded by donor tier, gold for platinum, silver for major, blue for general.
I built that template my second week in my father's office because the existing system was a mess of sticky notes and handwritten cards that Catherine's assistant kept losing.
I was twenty-two and proud of the improvement.
"Ardoin estate, November three years ago." Vanessa highlights a date in the header. "Private donor reception, sixty-eight confirmed guests. Cross-referencing with the shell company signatories gives us eleven overlapping names on a single evening."
The sound in the room pulls back. Kade is still talking. Vanessa is still typing. Their mouths move but the audio has dropped out of my life because my formatting is on that screen.
"Evangeline?" Cole, from somewhere outside the ringing in my ears.
I blink. Swallow. The room reassembles itself around me, and the faces that were watching their screens are watching me now, careful about it, the kind of careful reserved for something that might break.
"Keep going." My voice comes out thin. I clear my throat and it doesn't help. "I'm here. Keep going."
"Renaud and Liang are both listed." Cole leans forward. "Along with Whitfield, Hebert, and six names we haven't connected yet. Evangeline, what was the format of this event?"
"Cocktails in the main house, seven to nine.
" My voice works. I'm distantly impressed by this.
"Dinner in the garden pavilion. My father requested four private meeting rooms on the second floor for what he called 'intimate donor conversations.
' I set up the rooms. Water, bourbon, legal pads, pens.
He gave me a list of which donors went to which room and what time. "
"You scheduled the meetings."
"Yes."
"You walked each donor up personally."
"Personally. Watched them sit, offered them what they wanted, went back downstairs the way my father told me to. The donors preferred privacy." The pen is in my hand again, gripped hard enough that my knuckles have gone pale.
"There was a car." The words come out before I decide to say them. "A black sedan. It came through the service entrance around eight-thirty. My father told me it was a donor who preferred discretion, and I should make sure the kitchen staff stayed in the main house." I swallow. "So I did."
I cleared the path.
"Evie." Remy's voice, low, stripped of the operational register. Just my name.
I don't look at him. If I look at him, the crack in my chest will widen past what I can hold in a room full of people who are watching me.
"What else do you need from me about the Ardoin event?" The polish slides back into my voice and I hear it land hollow.
I push my chair back and stand. My legs hold. I walk to the screen. Five measured steps. My mother trained the walk into me when I was eight. I stop in front of the guest list, and the platinum-tier names glow gold under my fingertip when I touch the wall.
I trace a name. Then another. These fingers addressed invitations for this reception, calligraphy on cream cardstock because Catherine insisted on hand-lettered envelopes for platinum-tier donors.
These fingers minced garlic in Remy's kitchen yesterday while he stood in the doorway eight feet away and watched me listen to him name what my father is.
These fingers gripped the edge of his marble countertop weeks ago when he knelt between my thighs and put his mouth on me.
Then they gripped his shoulders while he had me against the wall because neither of us made it to the bedroom.
Same fingers. Same skill set. Build a trafficking network's social calendar. Build a life with the man dismantling it.
Does it matter which came first?
"The private meeting rooms." Cole's voice pulls me back. "Were they always the same configuration, or did the setup change between events?"
"Same layout every time." My voice is rougher now, the polish scraped away, and the Louisiana that lives underneath sounds closer to the surface than I've let it get in public since Georgetown.
"Four rooms, second floor, east wing. My father assigned donors to specific rooms by number, and the numbers never repeated across events.
Room one at the Ardoin was room three at the Thibodaux fundraiser six months earlier. I thought he was rotating for variety."
"He was rotating for counter-surveillance." Asher's assessment lands flat and certain. "Different room, different sight lines from the street, different audio profile. Basic operational security."
"Well." I flex my fingers against the screen, watching the gold names blur and refocus. "Turns out I'm excellent at facilitating covert meetings for a human trafficking network. Somebody should put that on my résumé."
The silence holds for one beat. Two.
Xander exhales a short breath that's almost a laugh and then stops, glancing around the table like he's checking whether laughing is allowed. Jax's pen stops spinning. Cole's expression doesn't change, but something behind his eyes recalculates.
I don't smile. It wasn't a joke. It also wasn't not a joke, and the space between those two things is where I've been living for the last hour.
"He used you as a distraction." Remy's voice is low, and the operational register is gone. What's left is stripped and careful.
"He used me as a very effective distraction." I don't turn from the screen. "I'm charming when I need to be. He knew that."