Chapter 38
Callum
The cursor blinked like a feckin’ metronome. Cold blue light spilled across the room, bouncin’ off steel and shadows. Seraphina was cross-legged on the floor, her fingers tappin’ away, quiet but deadly, as file after file cracked open like old bones and spilled what they’d been hidin’.
Rook kept everything. Course he did, the paranoid bastard.
We weren’t even halfway through the folders, and already we had enough dirt to bury half the bloody world elite. Blood money, ghost companies, back channels windin’ from Eastern Europe to South America—and every road led back to Blackdawn.
“That one,” I muttered, leanin’ forward. “Open it.”
She clicked. A log popped up—encrypted at first, but the lines started unravelin’ like loose thread. Then I saw it. The name.
D. Ryland.
The payments were regular. Large. Every month, same time. Old, too. Looked like a pension. Or hush money.
Seraphina froze.
“You know that name?” I asked.
She didn’t answer straightaway. Eyes locked on the screen, unmoving.
“He was in the reports,” she said, voice gone soft. “Back when my mum died. Last person seen with her. Was supposed to testify, then... gone.”
My jaw clenched. Typical.
“We’ve traced the payments back five years,” she murmured. “But she died seven years ago.”
“So the bastard kept gettin’ paid,” I growled, “ after she was already in the ground.”
I stood, couldn’t help it. My skin felt too tight, like it didn’t fit anymore.
She opened another folder. Surveillance stills. Most were shite—blurry, pixelated. A few had dates, locations. All buried under encrypted subfolders marked for deletion. Rook had tried to hide them—even from himself.
Then she stopped breathin’.
I turned just as she clicked the next image. A photo—grainy, low-res. Two people steppin’ out of a black car. One was clearly Ryland. The other...
“Seraphina,” I said, voice gone low.
Her hand hovered mid-air. “That’s her. That’s my mum.”
The timestamp said otherwise. Eighteen months after her recorded death.
“Could be an old photo,” I offered, even though I knew it was shite the moment I said it.
“That’s not what she looked like when she died.”
She turned to me then. Face calm, too calm. But her eyes—hell, her eyes were splinterin’.
“Why would they lie about her death?”
I had no answer. Not one that wouldn’t choke me.
She got to her feet, marched over to the whiteboard where we’d been tackin’ red string and thumbtacks like lunatics. She pinned the photo right beside the Facility E emblem.
“We keep diggin’,” she said.
I stepped up behind her. Close enough to catch the tremble in her fingers before she curled them into fists.
“Sera—”
“Don’t tell me to stop.”
“Wasn’t goin’ to.” I paused. “But this isn’t cleanup anymore. This is a fuckin’ reckoning.”
She looked up at me. Eyes dark as storm clouds. “It always was, Callum. You just didn’t know it yet.”
Christ.
We came into this thinkin’ we could root out the rot. Scorch it. Walk away after. But there’s no walkin’ away from this. Not for her. Not for me.
She turned back and moved one last pin.
“It’s not just the rot anymore,” she whispered. “It’s our roots.”
And I knew, down to the marrow—
We weren’t fightin’ their war anymore.
We were startin’ our own.