Wells
TWENTY-SIX
Remember You Are Dust: The words spoken with the ashes are a reminder of how little a person finally keeps hold of. He proves every dollar of it and ends with nothing in his hands but the name of the man who raised half of him.
I light another cigarette and stay where the noise goes quiet.
Work is the only place that still does it. When I force my mind into records and patterns and systems that follow rules, the Cera-shaped hole in my chest goes numb for whole minutes at a time.
I'm not fine. I'm functional, and functional is enough to do this. This is where I belong anyway, in the dark with the data, not out in some fucking park pretending to be a man who does yoga in the sun. That man got gutted. This one knows how to work.
Vin.
I've run the name a hundred times since the trust resolved to it last night, and it still won't fit in my mouth.
He taught me how a manifest breathes the summer I was seventeen and too angry to sit in a classroom.
He smoked my first cigar with me when I turned sixteen.
There isn't a year of my life he isn't standing somewhere in, family in everything but blood, and not one of us ever looked at him twice, because why would we?
That's the part that won't go quiet. So I do the only thing that's ever quieted anything in me. I prove it.
I run the money down, and it ends where I already knew it would. Vin's trust funded the burner that called Ridge to the warehouse.
I peel the offshore layers off it one at a time.
Underneath all of them is the same antiques company he's listed on his taxes for years, the little estate-furniture outfit that never clears a hundred grand, small enough to stay under the audits and clean on paper.
There's provenance for every piece, market price for every sale.
It's too small. That's the tell. A business that size couldn't hold a tenth of what's moved through that trust. The furniture was never the side hustle hobby. It's the rinse.
So I stop chasing the money and start chasing the freight.
I pull every load Vin personally signed off on over the last ten years and set the declared cargo against what actually crossed the docks.
The gaps are tiny. A hundred kilos buried in a container of machine parts, two hundred in a load of textiles.
Nothing a customs scale flags on that kind of volume.
But they're there, and they're consistent, and they never stop.
Ten years of them run into the tons.
Product padded into other men's cargo, carried out the back of the cleanest shipping operation on the Gulf, sold offshore for cash, and washed home through a furniture company until it came out the far side looking like a quiet man with good taste.
I check for someone over him. A financier, a partner, a hand running the play from above. I strip it to the floor, and there's no one there.
Only Vin.
He built every dollar of it himself, alone, no one above him, standing at my father's right hand the whole time and calling us family.
And once the money makes it undeniable, the entire year rearranges itself in front of me, every dead end with its fingerprints on it.
It started with a shipment. Ten million of Vin's own money in fentanyl already on the water, a hundred million waiting on the far end, and the only thing between him and that payday was getting it through our port while my father was alive to read the manifests.
My father started to see the shape of it before any of us did.
That's what got him killed. He went quiet and hired a surveillance man off the books to photograph meetings he never explained to anyone, going around the one man whose entire job was watching the family's blind spots, which tells me he'd already started watching Vin.
He meant to carry it alone until it was airtight.
Vin figured it out first, and Dad died before he ever got to say the name.
Then Vin spent the next year making sure none of us said it either. He put Boudreaux in the room first, the rival my father had spent years circling, the easy enemy, and pointed us at him.
When that didn't hold, he engineered the thing with Coco, a kidnapping ugly enough to start a war, because a war between families is exactly the kind of noise a man can walk a container through.
He didn't want us safe. He wanted us looking everywhere except at our own docks while his product cleared them.
Ridge didn't take the bait and didn't loosen a single control, and the shipment sat there exposed with Vin somewhere underneath it.
So he went nuclear. He threw the Duvalls under the bus, a paper family he could dress up as the smugglers, and handed us a killer to bury along with them.
It was the tidy story everyone wanted: drugs through Stone, a dead patriarch, a guilty name, and a clean ending.
We took it.
We put Duvall in the ground on Vin's word and closed the book, and he stood at the funeral with his hand on our shoulders while we buried the wrong story next to my father.
Every wrong turn, he was the one pointing. And I sat next to him and followed the money he wanted me to follow, straight to the door he picked out for me to knock on.
I close the laptop. The room is dark except for the window and the city beyond it. The proof is all there now, every dollar and every gap, and it changes nothing about the only fact that matters, the one I knew before I opened a single file.
The man who raised half of me killed the man who made me.
I reach for the pack, and my hand is shaking. I light one anyway and stare at the black glass.
I stand in Ridge's doorway and make myself cross it before I can think too hard about what I'm doing. I've never brought him a problem I couldn't solve alone. I'm about to break my own rule and hand him the worst thing I've ever found.
Ridge looks up from his desk. He reads my face in a second and closes the file in front of him.
"What is it?"
I step in and shut the door.
"You need to see this."
He leans back, brow drawn, already braced. He knows the look. Whatever I'm carrying is going to take something down with it.
I set the laptop on his desk and turn it toward him. The accounts are up, the trust, the wire chain, the offshore layers stripped back to the name at the bottom.
"What the fuck am I looking at?"
"Vin killed Dad."
Ridge goes still. His eyes drop to the screen. I watch him read it twice.
"What are you talking about, Wells?"
"It's all there. I've spent weeks pulling every thread I let slide last year. I started with the money. It was always the part that never added up. And then I met one of the guards who was standing outside the warehouse that night."
Ridge rubs his beard like he does when he's thinking. He stands up and puts his hands on either side of the laptop.
"You met with one of the men standing guard that night?"
"I did."
"Walk me through it."
So I do, in the flattest voice I own, because flat is the only way I can get the words out in order.
"He's been skimming for years. Small amounts of product tucked into other companies' containers, a hundred kilos here, two hundred there, never enough to flag on a load that size.
He never shipped a thing of his own. He had the access and the contacts, so he took a little off the top of other people's freight and let it run.
Over and over. For probably twenty years or more.
I can verify ten, because that's how far I went back. "
"Jesus."
"He never told Dad, because he knew what Dad would say. No product, ever, on a Stone load. That was the one line nobody crossed. So Vin didn't ask. He didn't need permission to run it quietly off to the side, and that's exactly what he did."
"How?"
"He's got no wife, no life outside this building, just the work and the money stacking up somewhere none of us ever thought to look."
Ridge's hand finds the edge of the desk.
"The antiques aren't a hobby. They're where he washes it. Every dollar comes out the far end looking like a quiet man who buys old furniture."
I scroll to the freight. "Then he got greedy.
He put ten million of his own into sourcing one shipment.
Fentanyl, a hundred million on the street.
That's on top of the ten he wired the hitter the day after Dad died.
Twenty million of his own money on the table before a single kilo cleared customs. But you can't tuck that much into somebody else's cargo and hope nobody weighs it. He needed a company to walk it through the front door.”
"Duvall," Ridge says.
"He rented him. A faceless offer, five million to be the name on the paperwork and initiate the shipment. Duvall never touched the product, never asked a question. Vin orchestrates the arrival, Duvall collects for doing nothing, and sending a shipment of electronics through our ports."
I make myself hold his eyes as he processes the gravity of what I just told him.
"Duvall wasn't the man, Ridge. He was paper.
Dad started tightening access and asking the wrong questions, which put the whole shipment at risk, so Vin took him out before he could say the name out loud.
And here's the part that should gut you.
It didn't even work. You flagged that container on weight three weeks after the funeral and pushed it to Homeland Security yourself.
It got seized at the dock. Vin murdered the man who raised him, twenty million of his own gone, the hundred-million payoff gone, all of it, for a load that never cleared customs."
"Then he sat in every meeting we ran and helped us build the case against the patsy he'd already picked out," Ridge finishes.
"Exactly."
Ridge doesn't say anything for a long moment. I watch it arrive on him, the same place it arrived on me an hour ago, the floor going out from under a thing he was sure of.
"We put two men in the ground for this." His voice drops low. "I put them there."
"They took dirty money. They weren't innocent." It's the only mercy I have, and it isn't much. "But they didn't kill Dad. Vin did, and he let them die for it while he stood next to us with his hand on our shoulders."
Ridge's knuckles go white.
"I executed them."
"You did."
"On his word."
"Yes."
“And the man who actually held the knife. The one Dane saw with the birthmark."
"Juno. Vin hired him for the kill and the frame, then put him in the ground the same way once he'd served his purpose. He took the fall, naming Boudreaux, exactly what Vin paid him to do. Ronnie turning up dead last month was Vin making sure there were no mouths out there."
Ridge stands. He paces to the window and braces both hands against the frame. His shoulders pull taut under his suit jacket.
"Where is he now?"
"Black Orchid."
Ridge turns. His face is stone.
"I want him dead. Tonight, in the same way the Duvalls went. But I want to do it."
I shake my head.
"No."
Ridge's eyes snap to mine. Fury sharpens his voice.
"No?"
"A bullet is mercy."
I step closer to the desk. My voice stays flat.
"I want the fortune first. Every account, every shell, every piece of safety he bought himself. I want him to watch it burn before he understands what comes next. It's his greed, after all. He did all of this for money."
Ridge stares at me. The rage in his face shifts. It doesn't soften. It calculates.
"How long?"
"Two weeks. Maybe three."
"And then?"
"Then he disappears. Slowly. The way he taught us to make problems go away. We reduce him to a nobody with nothing, and force him to live the rest of his days alone."
Ridge nods once. The decision locks into place.
"I want to keep everyone else out of this. They stay clean unless we need them."
"Agreed."
Ridge pulls his phone and texts something short. He sets it down and looks at me again.
"You carried this alone."
"It was mine to carry."
"It was ours."
I don't argue. Ridge doesn't know I am carrying something else. He has no idea we were together, or that I ruined it and she's gone.
My phone buzzes before I reach my office. Sandra Benney's name flashes across the screen.
I answer. "Wells."
"I need to speak with you about Cera Simum."
My hand tightens on the phone. I keep my voice level.
"Go ahead."
"She submitted her resignation. Effective immediately. Were you aware? I noticed she hasn't been here."
I sit at my desk because standing suddenly takes more than I have.
"Some of it."
Sandra pauses. The silence stretches long enough that I know she is choosing her words.
"She cited mental health. Said she needed time to care for herself. I wanted to ask if there is anything I should know from a human resources perspective."
I destroyed her.
"I think she needed a change."
"That's all?"
"Yes."
Sandra exhales.
"Okay, I'll close out her file."
Those words gut me, knowing it's final, that she will never be in this building again.
"I want you to give her a severance of a year's pay. And let her know you're leaving the door open if she ever wants to come back."
Sandra goes quiet again. Twelve months for a three-month employee will raise questions she will not ask.
"I'll prepare the paperwork."
"Thank you."
I end the call and set the phone on the desk.
The resignation makes it real. Cera is cutting every thread that binds us together and walking away.
Mental health.
The severance will keep her from being stranded, but It can't undo what I did, watching her bare herself while I stayed hidden.
Cera's voice cuts through it. You were both of them the whole time, and let me believe otherwise.
The hollow in my chest widens. I don't fight it. There is nothing left to fight for.
I destroyed the one real thing I had because I couldn't stop being the man who hides. Because in the dark is where I belong.
The screen is black in front of me. The cigarette burns down between my fingers.
I know exactly what I could do. I built the system. Thirty seconds and I'd know where her phone is pinging. A minute more and I'd know if she bought a plane ticket, if she went back to the platform under another name, if she called the man whose text I once watched cross her screen.
My hand moves before I decide to let it, reaching for the lid and the password and the trace my fingers know by muscle now.
I stop with them an inch off the edge.
If I find her, I find all of it, and if I find her with someone else I will burn the world down to reach her. I know that about myself as well as I know my own hands.
And tracing her is the thing that ended us. It's the proof she was right, the reason she looked at me and said she'd never trust me again and meant it in her bones.
I pull my hand back and lay it flat on the desk.
The not-knowing claws at me, and I let it. Sitting in it is the only thing I have left to give her, the one piece of decency I didn't already burn. She gets to be gone without me in her shadow.
I crush the cigarette and light the next one. The river slides black past the glass, and I watch it go.