Chapter Ten #2
"Without anyone noticing that his chief collector just disappeared?
" Cipher crouched in front of Devane. "Here's what I think.
I think Morrow's connections are exactly as strong as his ability to generate revenue.
I think without you keeping the books and Henley collecting the debts, his revenue drops to zero.
And I think regional people don't protect men who can't earn. "
Devane's mouth closed.
"I think you're the last piece of infrastructure keeping Morrow's operation alive. And I think you know it."
The USB drive beeped. Copy complete.
Cipher pulled it and pocketed it. Then he turned to the banker's box and started photographing every unshredded page, his phone clicking in rapid succession. Names, amounts, addresses. The full scope of Morrow's parasitic empire, documented in a bookkeeper's careful hand.
"Please," Devane said. The word came out thin. Reedy. "I can give you information. Account numbers. Where the money goes. Morrow's contacts—names, locations, everything."
"You had twenty years to give that information to someone who could've stopped this." Cipher set down his phone. "Twenty years of watching men lose their homes, their families, their lives. And you kept the books."
"It was a job—"
"Laura Simmons' father lost forty thousand dollars at your tables. Then he died, and you sent collectors after his daughter." Cipher's voice went flat. "A woman who makes flower arrangements and clears three hundred dollars a month. You looked at your ledger and marked her PRIORITY."
Devane's face crumbled. "I didn't—that wasn't my decision—"
"You typed her name into the system. You calculated the interest. You flagged the account." Cipher stood. "You did the math that sent men to terrorize a woman in her own shop."
"I'm sorry—"
"No. You're not."
Cipher drew his knife.
Devane saw it and pressed himself against the wall, hands raised, words tumbling out in a desperate stream—"I have money, I have accounts, I can transfer everything, please, please—"
The knife went in clean. Devane's stream of words became a gasp, then a gurgle, then silence.
Cipher wiped the blade on Devane's shirt and stood.
The office was quiet now except for the shredder's idle hum. Cipher powered it off, gathered the unshredded pages from the banker's box, and stacked them with the laptop and his USB drive.
Cargo appeared in the doorway. "Room's clear. Cleanup's en route."
"I need five minutes." Cipher started scanning the office—filing cabinets, desk drawers, the shelves along the back wall. More records. More evidence. More proof of twenty years of human misery organized into neat financial columns.
He found a second laptop in the bottom drawer, powered off. A stack of external hard drives in a fireproof lockbox under the desk. A notebook filled with phone numbers and names he didn't recognize—the regional contacts Devane had mentioned, maybe. Morrow's protection network.
Everything went into the banker's boxes.
"Cipher." Cargo's voice was quiet. "We need to move."
"One more thing."
He crossed back to the shredder bin and scooped out the confetti of destroyed pages. Most were unrecoverable—cross-cut shredding did its job. But some strips were wide enough to show partial names, partial numbers. Maybe enough to reconstruct, maybe not.
He bagged the confetti anyway.
Every signal mattered. Even the corrupted ones.
"Now we move," he said.
They left through the side door, the way they'd come.
The parking lot was silent—eleven vehicles sitting empty under stars that didn't care about the violence that had happened beneath them.
Somewhere across Fayetteville, two gamblers in golf shirts were stumbling out of Ghost's SUV six blocks south, blindfolded and shaking, already composing the story they'd tell themselves about a poker game that ended in gunfire.
They wouldn't go to the police. Men who gambled at illegal tables didn't invite cops into their lives.
Cipher mounted his bike in the shadow of the textile mill. The banker's boxes were strapped to Cargo's saddlebags—too bulky for Cipher's setup, and Cargo had the storage capacity.
The ride back to the compound took twenty-two minutes. Cipher spent every one of them thinking about the laptop drive in his pocket. Morrow's complete debtor database. Every name, every amount, every piece of leverage the gambling operation had ever used to destroy a life.
Laura's name, highlighted in yellow.
Not anymore.
At the compound, Cipher carried the boxes straight to the tech room.
The laptops went into his analysis station.
The hard drives went into a shielded cabinet for later examination.
The unshredded ledger pages went into the scanner, digital copies uploading to the secure server before the originals were even filed.
He plugged in the USB drive and opened Devane's master database.
Four hundred and twelve debtors. Total outstanding debt across all accounts: $2.3 million. Collection notes spanning two decades of broken bones, seized property, and ruined lives.
Laura's entry sat in the middle of the spreadsheet. $40,000. Interest accruing at 15% monthly since her father's death. Current balance: $76,240.
They'd nearly doubled the debt in six months without telling her.
Cipher's hands were steady on the keyboard. They were always steady when he was working signals. But something cold and precise was building in his chest—the same feeling he'd had in the body shop, the same feeling he'd had watching Devane feed pages into the shredder.
The feeling that said: this ends.
He encrypted the database, copied it to the secure drive, and shut down the laptop.
Two down. Morrow left.
And now Cipher had every record, every name, every piece of evidence he needed to make sure Vincent Morrow's twenty-year empire didn't just fall—it disappeared. Like it had never existed. Like the signals it broadcast had been jammed so thoroughly that not even an echo remained.
He pulled out his phone and typed a message to Laura: Devane's done. Records recovered. Come to the compound tomorrow—there's something you need to see.
The response came in thirty seconds. She was awake again. Waiting again.
I'll be there.
Cipher set down the phone and looked at the banker's boxes stacked against the wall. Twenty years of misery, boxed and cataloged. Four hundred and twelve names who'd been bled dry by a man who thought his empire was untouchable.
Two of his three pillars were gone now. Henley's muscle. Devane's books.
All that remained was Morrow himself.
And Morrow's time was running out faster than he knew.