Chapter Fourteen
Files
Vance was waiting in the yard when Marcus arrived, face drawn tight in the gray predawn light, and the two prospects flanking him looked like men who had been woken up for something they did not yet understand but already knew was serious.
“Tell me everything,” Marcus said, swinging off his bike before the engine had fully died.
“Castillo’s been talking since last night.
My contact inside the Serpents says he’s telling anyone who’ll listen that Selene didn’t just walk away clean.
He’s saying she took a drive with her, financial records, communications, the kind of thing that could tie specific transactions back to specific people on both sides of this mess.
” Vance’s jaw was tight, controlled in the way of a man who had spent fifteen years learning not to panic out loud even when panic was the only honest response available.
“If it’s true, and if it gets into the wrong hands, or the right hands depending on how you look at it, it could hand federal investigators exactly the kind of paper trail this club has spent thirty years making sure never existed in writing. ”
“Is it true?”
“I don’t know. Nobody’s actually seen this drive.
Nobody’s actually seen Selene since she left.
This could be exactly what it sounds like, or it could be Castillo manufacturing a threat to justify whatever he does next, or it could be something in between, a real drive that does not contain nearly what he’s claiming it does.
” Vance rubbed a hand over his face, exhausted in a way that went beyond one interrupted night’s sleep.
“The problem is, we cannot afford to treat it as a bluff if it is not one, and we cannot afford to panic over nothing if it is.”
Marcus looked past Vance toward the office window, where he knew Callie would already be at her desk, pulling together whatever information existed to make sense of a threat that had arrived with almost no verifiable shape to it yet, and felt the vertigo of realizing that the consequences of his own choices four months ago had grown into something with teeth of its own, moving now under a momentum he no longer fully controlled.
“Call church,” Marcus said. “Tonight. I want everyone who has any exposure to that drive, if it exists, to hear this from me before they hear a distorted version from someone else’s mouth.”
“That’s most of the table, Marcus. Fifteen years of business, most of it clean, some of it not entirely.”
“I know. That is exactly why they need to hear it from their president, not from a rumor traveling through three other clubs first.” Marcus started toward the stairs, then paused, looking back at Vance with something that was not quite an apology and not quite a request. “I need you to find out everything you can about where Selene actually went. If she has this drive, if it’s real, I want to talk to her before Castillo or anyone else does.
She confessed to Reyes what she actually did and why.
I don’t think she’s the villain in this anymore, if she ever fully was.
I think she’s a woman who made a catastrophic mistake and then found the courage to walk away from it, and I do not want her paying for Castillo’s lies on top of her own real ones. ”
“You want to protect the woman who tried to blackmail you.”
“I want to find the truth before somebody else gets to write the version that suits them best.” Marcus held Vance’s gaze, steady. “That is not the same thing as protecting her. But it is not nothing either.”
He found Callie exactly where he expected, already three calls deep into her own investigation, phone wedged between shoulder and ear while her hands moved across a legal pad covered in the same precise, unhurried handwriting she brought to every crisis, and he stood in the doorway a moment simply watching her work, the woman who had chosen him again eight hours ago now fully transformed back into the architect who had once dismantled three grown men across a folding table.
She held up one finger, finishing her call, and hung up before turning to face him fully.
“Warren’s making calls to a contact in county law enforcement,” she said.
“Quietly, off the record, to find out if any drive matching this description has actually surfaced anywhere, evidence lockup, pawn shops, anywhere a stolen physical drive might end up if someone were trying to sell it rather than simply hold it as leverage.”
“And?”
“Nothing yet. Which could mean it does not exist, or it could mean whoever has it is being careful.” She set down her pen, studied him with the same assessing focus she had turned on him for six weeks straight, and he understood, watching her, that whatever tenderness had passed between them hours earlier had not disappeared, simply folded itself back beneath the version of her the crisis required.
“I called church too. Same time as you, probably. I want the businesses’ documentation completely separated from anything the club itself might be exposed to, tonight, before anyone else even knows to look for the distinction. ”
“You already thought of that.”
“I think of everything, Marcus. That has never been the problem in this marriage.” Something almost gentle crossed her face despite the gravity of the morning, an echo of the night before still visible underneath the crisis.
“The problem was never my competence. It was whether you would ever fully see it, or keep taking it for granted the way you did for nine years without meaning to.”
“I see it now. Every single day.”
“I know you do.” She stood, crossed the room, and for a moment neither the crisis nor the six weeks of careful distance before it seemed to matter at all, just the two of them, steady, present, facing the same direction.
“We handle this together. Church tonight, full disclosure, the way you handled the last one. I meant what I said last night, Marcus. I am not interested in a husband who protects me by keeping me in the dark. I am interested in a partner.”
“Then that is exactly what you have.”
She kissed him, brief but certain, a promise rather than an invitation, and pulled back before either of them could let it become something the morning did not have time for.
“Go find Vance,” she said. “Find out everything you can about where Selene went. I will handle the county side. We reconvene at four, before church, and we walk in there together with every piece of this laid out clearly, the way we should have done everything from the very beginning.”
He left her there, already back on the phone, already three steps ahead of the crisis the way she always was, and rode out into a morning that had started with more tenderness than he had felt in six long weeks and was already, by necessity, folding itself back into the shape of a war neither of them had chosen but both of them, together now, intended to win.
He spent the day chasing threads that mostly led nowhere.
Selene’s last known apartment in Stockton had been cleared out three days before she officially left the Serpents, which told him she had been planning her exit longer than her confession to Reyes suggested, a detail that made him uneasy in a way he could not fully articulate.
A contact of Vance’s placed her possibly crossing into the next county heading south, though the sighting was two days old and unconfirmed.
Nobody, anywhere, had actually seen the drive Castillo claimed she was carrying.
By late afternoon he had assembled a picture that satisfied nobody.
A woman who had genuinely tried to walk away from the damage she caused, whose exit had somehow already become a weapon in someone else’s hands regardless of her own intentions, and a threat that might be real, might be manufactured, and might, most unsettlingly, be some version of both, a real drive containing far less than Castillo was claiming, weaponized through exaggeration rather than outright fabrication.
He met Callie back at the office at four, exactly as planned, and found her with a stack of documentation organized into three careful piles, a woman who had spent the day building order out of chaos the same way she built everything else.
“Business records, fully separated and secured,” she said, tapping the first pile.
“Anything with even tangential club exposure, isolated and flagged for the table’s own legal counsel to review before church.
And this,” she tapped the third pile, smaller, “is everything Warren’s contact could find on Castillo himself.
He has his own exposure, Marcus. Two prior filings very similar to this one, both eventually traced back to extortion schemes that fell apart when the target refused to fold.
He is not operating from strength. He is operating from a pattern of bluffs that occasionally, but not always, have real teeth behind them. ”
“So we do not know if this one has teeth.”
“No. But we know he has bluffed before and lost before, which means the table needs to hear that context tonight, not just the raw fear of a rumor about stolen files.” She looked up at him, steady, the same partnership he had asked for and she had, cautiously, extended.
“You lead tonight. But you lead with everything I just handed you. That is what partnership looks like, Marcus. Not you protecting the table from complexity. You and I, together, give them the whole truth so they can make an informed decision instead of a frightened one.”
“Together,” he agreed, and meant it with the full weight of everything the last twenty four hours had taught him about what that word actually required.
They walked into church side by side that evening, for the first time since the night everything had broken apart in that exact room, and Marcus understood, looking out at the same twenty six faces that had once watched him confess his worst failure, that whatever came of tonight, he was no longer facing it as a man standing alone at the head of a table.
He was facing it beside his wife, and for the first time in six long weeks, that felt like more than enough to withstand whatever Castillo, or Reyes, or the ghosts of Selene’s four months of grief still had left to throw at them.