Chapter 11 #2
The man’s been playing chess with a live grenade and I’ve watched him set traps for years.
I used to think corporations were just bigger versions of syndicates — legal names, softer lighting, worse reputations.
Now I know it.
But Tidball is the kind of predator who wears trust like a suit.
He smiles with benevolence.
He soothes with a hallway gesture.
He makes you think you’re protected just before the blade falls.
That’s the dangerous kind.
The kind that makes real violence look like mercy by comparison.
And right now…
I want violence.
Not for myself.
Not for vengeance.
But for clarity.
A world without illusions.
Unfiltered truth.
I close my eyes.
The faint hum of the console is a buzz against my skin. I can almost taste the data drifting in the air — cold, electric, like ozone before a storm.
The problem with wanting someone dead — especially someone like Tidball — is not the act itself.
It’s the consequences.
The ripples.
The unfixable damage done to the woman I care about.
If I snapped his neck with my bare hands…
Yara would never trust her own instincts again.
She’d blame herself for letting me into her life.
She’d think she caused it.
That I’d become what she fought all her life to avoid — a monster no different from those she beat back with strategy and grit.
So, I don’t kill him.
I hunt for proof instead.
Better than blood.
I start with the informants I’ve cultivated over cycles — the smugglers who slip across interstellar cracks, the data brokers who traffic in secrets like currency, the gunrunners who know how to ask the right questions without getting drawn and quartered by coalition security.
One by one, I call in favors.
Not demands.
Not threats.
Favors.
Because true alliances don’t come with knives behind their backs.
And the answers don’t come fast.
But they come.
The first one is a smuggler on Epsilon-Nine Station — a plasteel maze of vapor markets and neon shadows. He meets me in a back room where the smell is half booze, half spice, and all secrets. I can feel the weight of his unregistered weapon beneath his coat before he even smiles his crooked grin.
“Grau,” he says, like greeting an old scar.
“Where’s the data move from the last breach traced?” I ask, voice low.
He smirks.
“You don’t come here for drinks, tar-skin.”
I don’t need to answer.
He hands me a file.
Not data logs.
Not surface traces.
Financial movements.
Every pipeline, every redirected asset, every manipulated contract.
And tucked deep in there?
A series of signatures linked back to shell accounts with a familiar pattern.
One only a corporate ghost could produce.
I leave him with a credit chip and a nod — nothing more.
No thanks.
No discussion.
Just the cold click of a door behind me.
The second is a data broker in the Kessan undergrid — labyrinthine servers humming in the dark, illuminated only by pulsing readouts and the occasional spark of stolen algorithm.
He values anonymity more than life itself.
So I watch his eyes narrow when I appear.
“Sit,” I say. “We don’t have all day.”
He swallows — not fear.
Something more like respect.
“You’re not here to buy,” he says.
“No,” I say. “I’m here to collect.”
He hands over raw correspondence — emails, voice logs, coded messages between accounts tied to insider shareholders, offshore subsidiaries, shell corporations, and — unmistakably — a recurring signature:
Tidball.
But masked.
Not just masked — engineered.
Like a master draftsperson hiding the core beam support inside a decorative column.
This isn’t sloppiness.
This is expert obfuscation.
Yet mistakes were made.
Enough for me to follow the thread.
And I do.
At each turn, I feel it — that strange quiet that comes right before the collapse of facades.
I can almost taste the truth in the air — a brackish mix of ozone and inevitability.
And for a moment — just a flash — I feel that sick, cold calm again.
The same feeling I got when I thought about killing Tidball.
Not anger.
Not bloodlust.
Just absolute, serene clarity.
But I don’t act.
Because she’s built a world of order not chaos.
And I’m not here to burn her world down.
I’m here to save it.
By tearing out the rot.
I gather every scrap of incriminating data — transactional trails that show fraud, mislabeled shipping logs, payoff accounts that tie back to manufacturing crises, delayed contracts timed for maximum destabilization, and more.
Every piece of this puzzle points back to a pattern:
Tidball didn’t just want her to fail.
He wanted to orchestrate it.
Step by step.
Crisis by crisis.
Spinning every misstep into a narrative of incompetence.
But then there’s the worst part.
The part that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand upright.
Tidball’s been spreading rumors about me.
Not just corporate gossip.
Not just rumors about a Reaper in the boardrooms where he doesn’t belong.
No.
He’s linking me to the breaches.
He’s painting me as the dangerous influence.
The saboteur.
The threat.
He’s turned my presence — something I offered to protect her — into supposed liability.
That’s not clever.
That’s cowardly.
And damn does it make my blood pressure spike.
Not the burning rage of violence.
Not the impulsive fury of a bruised beast.
But the calm clarity of a man who sees the threat and knows exactly where to cut first.
And I almost act on it.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, eyes closed, feeling the carousel of thoughts spinning — thinking about Yara’s delicate balance, about how fragile she feels under pressure, about how easily this man twists narratives to his benefit.
I want to destroy him.
I want to end him.
I want to watch the light leave his eyes.
But I don’t.
Not yet.
Because she wouldn’t forgive that.
She would never survive the truth that it was me in her company that snapped.
Not that way.
Not that deeply.
So instead I turn to my console.
My fingers trace every thread of evidence.
Every breadcrumb.
Every lie.
I compile it into one, shining, undeniable truth:
Foster’s sabotage.
Redirections.
Manipulations.
Rumors painted as facts.
And the fingerprints of one Jonathan Tidball.
But Tidball is faster than I expected.
Faster than caution should allow.
By the time I have the puzzle laid out in front of me — by the time I have the proof in a clean stream I can present to her without blood or ruin…
He’s already taken another move.
The board’s next wave of accusations aren’t just aimed at a division.
They’re aimed at her.
And the rumor now spreads wider:
She protects the saboteur.
She can’t see who’s ruining her.
She’s naive.
She’s weak.
And worse — she’s tied to someone dangerous.
It’s a checkmate in public relations before I even have the board’s full meeting minutes in hand.
I stand there — the holo displays glowing like burning embers in the dark.
Everything I’ve assembled is elegant and damning.
And it should end this.
But it won’t.
Not yet.
Because now the battlefield has shifted.
Now it’s public.
Now it’s not just Tidball and me.
Now it’s also Yara’s reputation.
And that changes the rules.
Suddenly, what I thought was patience feels like a cage.
Like a countdown.
Like the quiet before a warhammer drops.
I close my eyes.
Inhale deep.
And I allow that strange, terrifying, serene clarity to wash over me again.
Not rage.
Not violence.
Just certainty.
I will not let him destroy her.
And if it takes every ally, every secret, every unlawful channel I’ve ever whispered with in dark alleys across star systems…
Then so be it.
Because this isn’t just corporate warfare.
This is a reckoning.
And sooner or later, someone is going to bleed.