Chapter Thirty
Elena
The call from Agent Reyes came on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday afternoon, and the moment Elena heard the careful gravity in her voice, she understood that whatever peace they'd built over the preceding months was about to be tested again.
"There's been a development in the sentencing phase," Agent Reyes said.
"Victor's team has been cooperating in exchange for reduced charges on some of the financial counts.
Part of that cooperation includes information about Concord's broader network — associates, other participants, people who were never directly named in the original investigation. "
"How broad?" Elena asked, feeling the familiar cold settle into her chest.
"Broader than we initially understood. Concord wasn't just Victor and your father-in-law's original structure, Ms. Voss.
There were at least two other families involved at a similar level — established, wealthy, protected.
Victor's naming names now because he's hoping it buys him a shorter sentence.
" A pause, heavier now. "One of the names he's given us is a man named Alexander Voss. "
Elena went very still.
"That's not possible," she said. "My father died when I was six. Car accident. There's no—"
"I know this is difficult to hear," Agent Reyes said gently.
"But the timeline matches, Ms. Voss. Your father's death wasn't reported as connected to Concord in any official record, but Victor's testimony suggests otherwise.
He's claiming your father was involved in the network years before Damon's father was, and that his death wasn't an accident either. "
Elena sat down heavily, the phone nearly slipping from her hand, the careful architecture of her own history — the one certainty she'd built her entire adult life around, the story of a father lost too young to simple, tragic bad luck — cracking apart in real time, the same way Damon's understanding of his own father's death had cracked open months earlier.
"Why would Victor lie about this," she said, though even as she said it, she understood the answer.
"He might not be lying," Agent Reyes said quietly. "Ms. Voss, I think you need to sit down with Damon and hear the rest of what we've found, because if Victor's telling the truth, your connection to this conspiracy didn't start the day Castellan Group hired you for an audit."
"It started before I was born," Elena said, the realization landing with the terrible weight of an inevitability she should have seen coming. "The whole time I thought I was investigating his family's tragedy. I might have been investigating my own."