Chapter 21 Helena
HELENA
Vanguard’s daughter was a ghost.
Octavia’s digital footprint was near impossible to find, as her father had been meticulous in his attempt to hide her.
It was fucking infuriating trying to pick at the edges without touching the Triarchy database when I knew those systems could find her in hours.
The second that system queried her name, it risked notifying Vanguard, and I had no intention of tipping him off that we were looking for her.
Which meant we had been doing it the hard way, and it was taking too long.
Week after week of dead ends had dragged by until I was desperate enough to do something inconceivable.
My Discord server pinged softly beside my keyboard, and I dragged my phone closer, unlocking the screen. A message waited in the private channel I had avoided for over a decade. I had an idea, I just need the tools to carry it out.
Lorenzo
I have what you requested, but Mattia says if you want it you need to call home.
I stared at the message for a moment before leaning back in the chair and dragged a hand down my face.
Of course he did.
Tapping the call icon before I could talk myself out of it, I jiggled my leg in silence, listening as the line rang twice before it was answered.
“Helena,” Mattia said, his voice overly warm and so fake it made me want to hang up. “It has been a long time since you remembered you have family.”
“Family is a loose approximation of what we are,” I replied evenly. “Lorenzo said you wanted to speak to me.”
A laugh rolled down the line. “Information is currency, cara mia. We have what you want and ask for very little in return.”
I rubbed my temple.
“What do you have?”
There was a pause and the sound of papers shifting before he spoke again.
“Your ghost,” he said. “Octavia Vanguard. Very carefully hidden, but not invisible.”
I stilled, staring at my screen and the meager information I had been able to find on my own. “Location?”
“She moves,” he said. “But the pattern is consistent. Mostly rural properties, but I have found one account linked to her that is not dormant.
“So, I can track her financials?” I asked.
Mattia hummed softly. “And that is the interesting part.”
I leaned forward slightly, resting my elbows on the desk. “Go on.”
“Quarterly transfers,” he said. “Substantial ones. They come from a Vanguard holding account and arrive with the kind of regularity that suggests an allowance rather than business movements.”
“And?”
“And none of it is spent.”
I frowned. “What do you mean none of it is spent?”
“Every quarter the funds land,” he continued, “and within forty-eight hours they are redistributed as charitable donations. Medical foundations. Refugee programs. Women’s shelters.
Disaster relief accounts. It moves quickly enough that most banks wouldn’t notice the pattern unless they were looking for it. ”
I sat back slowly.
“So, she’s laundering it.”
“No,” Mattia said. “The charities are legitimate, we checked. She’s giving it away.”
Silence settled between us for a moment.
Vanguard had quietly been funding his daughter for years, enough money each month to keep her comfortable without needing to surface publicly. And she was emptying the account into charities.
Interesting.
“Helena,” Mattia said, his voice softer now. “Why are you interested in this woman? If she has hurt you, the family will deal with her. You are Vitale. Family first, above all else.”
“She borrowed my favorite strap-on and never returned it. I’m planning to glitter bomb the shit out of her.”
He made a disgusted sound, muttering something I couldn’t hear.
“Always the jester, Helena. The years have not changed you, I see.”
I ignored him. “What is this going to cost me?”
“Your father misses you,” Mattia said. “It pains me to see my brother in such a way. I want you to call him. Make amends.”
I grimaced, pinching the bridge of my nose. “One phone call.”
“One per month,” he countered. “Or you can find other ways of ghost hunting. And don’t think Lorenzo will be as helpful next time.”
I put the phone on the counter, mouthing a few of the filthiest curses I knew.
“Helena?” His voice drifted faintly through the line, and I picked it up, taking a deep breath before answering.
“Fine. But for such an irritating fucking cost, I need another favor.”
A quiet chuckle drifted down the line. “Of course you do.”
“I want a company incorporated in the UK under the Vanguard girl’s name,” I said, watching the cursor blink on my screen. “Can you do that?”
There was a pause. “That is…unusual.”
“It won’t exist for long,” I said. “Set it up, open a line of credit against it, and then liquidate the business.”
“How large?”
“Large enough to hurt.”
“And the timeline?”
“Backdate the closure to a month ago,” I said. “Make it look like she defaulted.”
Mattia let out a low whistle. “You have become very strategic since you left us, piccola.”
“I was always strategic,” I said. “So that’s it? You do this, I phone once a month, and we are even.”
He laughed softly. “For now. I will send the documentation tonight.”
I allowed myself a small, satisfied breath as he hung up, trying not to think about what it had cost me. I had spent years trying to separate myself from my past, and I had just flung that door wide open.
Checkmate, Octavia. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the move may cost me my queen.
Uncle Mattia was a man of his word, if nothing else. Not only was the intel sitting in my inbox before 2100hrs, but it was thorough in a way that made it painfully clear how powerful they had become since I left.
The file opened across three screens as I sorted through it.
Mattia hadn’t just found Octavia. He had peeled back the careful layers her father had wrapped around her and laid them neatly in front of me like the bait it was. I tried to push the realization to the back of my mind. I would deal with the consequences when Erryn’s Chair was secure.
Octavia’s movements were sporadic enough that pinning down an exact location was difficult, but not impossible.
Rural properties across northern Europe.
A cottage outside Lyon rented under rotating aliases.
A farmhouse in the Swiss countryside she had stayed at twice in the last year.
A converted monastery somewhere in northern Italy that had clearly belonged to someone with money.
But none of the locations held long enough to even attempt a retrieval.
I had to give it to him. Vanguard knew what he was doing.
The real prize was buried in the last file Mattia had sent: the login credentials for the charity account he had traced back to her which included a linked email. It took me less than ten minutes to break through the layers of security and reroute all incoming and outgoing traffic.
Every message sent and received from the account now flowed quietly into a
shadow inbox on my own system. I leaned back in the chair, watching the redirected feed slowly populate across the screen.
It wasn’t enough to track her directly, but it was a fucking start.
I uploaded all the information, including the shadow inbox, to a burner iPad and padded out to find Erryn.
She was at the desk she had ordered for our temporary accommodation.
When she wasn’t at the base, she almost lived at that desk, the blow from Vanguard pushing her to work harder and put more of herself into a company that already took so much.
I had watched her negotiate a false surrender to Vanguard over the past five weeks, and it had taken everything in her.
And fuck, to the outside it looked clean.
The Washington faction was set to commence in eight weeks, with Erryn slated to take over its operation and a contract already signed by all three Chairs acknowledging Vanguard’s succession to London.
She had negotiated fiercely to keep him at bay until the US faction was fully in motion, framing it as a matter of optics.
If the transition was going to pass cleanly beneath the agents’ notice—look like nothing more than a routine promotion—then she had to remain in her seat until the new faction was formally established.
I wanted to gut him. Watching her expose her throat to that man, even in subterfuge, was hellish. Finding Octavia was worth the price I would pay.
I slid into Erryn’s lap, straddling her and smirking at the irritated look she threw at me.
“Helena,” she began, and I silenced her with a kiss.
“I have a present for you,” I murmured against her lips, leaning back and pressing the iPad into her hands.
She looked down in confusion, then back at me. “What am I looking at?”
“Octavia’s email, bank accounts, and last known locations,” I said.
Her gaze snapped back to the screen. “Where is she?”
“I haven’t got her exact coordinates yet,” I said. “But—” I interrupted her as she went to speak. “Wait until you hear the fun part.”
“Helena, I’m too tired to play games.”
I pouted, not that it did the slightest bit of difference, and I sighed, rolling my eyes and clicking on one of the tabs.
Erryn read through the documentation slowly, one brow lifting as she reached the liquidation notice. “This is in her name,” she said.
“It was,” I corrected. “For about six weeks. I considered a few options, but I thought a rival tech company was a nice touch. Really piss daddy off.”
She looked up at me then, the faintest hint of interest sharpening her expression.
“You created a company under Octavia Vanguard’s identity,” she said carefully, “opened a line of credit against it…and then bankrupted it?”
“Liquidated,” I said mildly. “Bankruptcy is messy.”
Erryn leaned back in her chair, studying the screen again, one hand resting on my hip, a fingertip stroking gently. She huffed a laugh. “And now she owes a considerable debt to several very unpleasant lenders.”
“That’s the idea.”
Her gaze flicked up to mine. “You’re assuming she’ll care.”