Chapter 10 No Softer For It #2
He signed the lease. Sent the confirmation. Watched the email leave his outbox with the particular finality of a decision that couldn't be walked back once she noticed the listing had disappeared from the market.
Ronan reappeared an hour later, this time with actual numbers rather than theories, spreading a printed report across Matteo's desk with the careful precision of a man delivering information he already suspected wouldn't be well received.
"Distributor's financials are messier than they should be for a company that size," Ronan said. "Three payments in the last eight months that don't match any invoiced client. Round numbers, wired from an offshore account, no documentation attached beyond a memo line that just says consulting fee."
"Consulting fee for a produce distributor."
"Exactly." Ronan tapped the report. "And the account those wires came from traces back, eventually, through two shell companies, to a name that matches what our courier gave us. Sorin."
Matteo studied the numbers, cold clarity settling over the earlier unease, and understood, with the particular certainty that had guided every major decision of his career, that whatever this actually was, it had moved considerably past a supply chain irregularity.
"He's using the distributor to launder something," Matteo said. "Consulting fees for services that don't exist, moving money through a legitimate business that both my club and hers use as a supplier."
"That's my read."
"Which means whatever product came through my dock three nights ago is connected to whatever money's moving through those wires, and both of them run through a company with regular deliveries to Marea.
" Matteo's jaw set, hard, the earlier guilt over the warehouse lease burning away entirely under the sharper, more immediate danger of a threat he still didn't fully understand the shape of.
"I want everything on Sorin. Every alias, every property, every associate.
If he's running this through her supply chain, I need to know exactly how deep it goes before I say a single word to her about it. "
"And the warehouse."
Matteo looked at the confirmation email still open on his screen, the lease he'd signed less than two hours ago, the decision that would cost Del something real the moment she found out, and felt the two competing truths sit side by side in his chest without resolving into anything comfortable.
He was protecting her by staying quiet until he had proof.
He was also actively hurting her, right now, today, over a business dispute that had stopped mattering to him the moment her hand had fisted in his hair on that bar top.
Both were true. Neither made the other easier to live with.
"The warehouse stands," he said. "I'm not softening the war because of one night. If anything, I need to keep it running exactly as it was, so nobody, including her, starts asking why my methods changed the same week we ended up in bed together."
"That's cold."
"It's necessary."
"Those aren't the same thing, and you know it."
Matteo didn't answer, because Ronan was right, and admitting it out loud would require him to sit with a discomfort he had no functional use for right now, not with a threat circling closer to her than she knew and a distributor's financials sitting on his desk like a countdown he couldn't yet read the endpoint of.
"Get me the full file on Sorin," he said instead. "Today, if you can manage it. And keep the warehouse lease quiet until it's fully signed. I don't want her hearing about it secondhand before it's finalized."
Ronan left without further argument, though the disapproval in his expression followed him all the way to the door, and Matteo sat alone at his desk with the lease confirmation still glowing on his screen and the distributor's financials spread across the wood in front of him, two decisions occupying the same hour of his life that pulled in directions he had no honest way of reconciling.
He'd told himself last night changed what he was willing to admit wanting.
He hadn't told himself it would change what he was willing to do about the war still standing between them, and sitting here now, watching the warehouse email confirm itself in his sent folder, he understood exactly how far apart those two things had become in the space of a single morning.
She was going to find out. Probably within days, once her real estate contact called to tell her the space she'd been eyeing for over a year had been quietly leased out from under her by a buyer who hadn't even bothered to negotiate on price.
She was going to know exactly who'd done it.
Matteo closed the report, squared the edges with more precision than the gesture required, and told himself, one more time, that the decision had been the right one. Strategically sound. Consistent with everything he'd built his empire on.
He didn't fully believe it. He signed the confirmation anyway, and let the small, unfamiliar weight of that contradiction settle into his chest where it stayed, unresolved, for the rest of the day.