Chapter 43
Callum
It always starts with the wee things. A misfiled document.
A name dropped in passin'. A line on a donor list no one bothers to question. That’s where corruption festers—not hid in the shadows, but right out in the open.
Boring enough that no one wants to look too close, tangled enough that even if they did, they’d never find the start o’ the string.
We’d been back at the safehouse just over a day. Long enough for the tension to simmer low, but not disappear. Kieran and I’d had words. Nothin’ dramatic, but sharp enough to draw a line. It was under control now—filed away as necessary friction. Still, it lingered, like the hum of a power line.
Seraphina had buried herself in the data. Head down, eyes locked to the screen like it owed her a pound of flesh. The others tried to keep pace, but she was relentless. From my spot across the room, I watched her tear through digital trails like they’d wronged her personally.
We’d split the team. Seraphina, Reaper, and Emerson—our data forensics lad and a former fed—handled the virtual side. Kieran and I dug through the dirt. Financial records. Property registries. Asset trails. The bones and blood of the whole machine.
"You’re not gonna like this," Kieran muttered, dropping a folder on the table.
I cracked it open. First page—real estate holdings. Shell corps. A fuckin’ spiderweb with no clear center.
"All of it loops back to the same bastard," he added.
I flipped another page. There it was. Again and again.
Senator Julian Crest.
It hit like a blade drawn slow. "You sure?"
"Dead sure. He’s in everything. Campaign cash, zoning permits, private security contracts. Even the medical licenses for the shell clinics Blackdawn uses to process subjects."
My jaw locked tight. This wasn’t some puppet dancing on strings. This was the hand holding the whole bloody theater.
Seraphina stepped up, hair tied in a messy knot, face carved from focus. She tossed a USB onto the table.
"Crest’s paper trail is scrubbed," she said. "Twenty people at least working to keep it that way—PR firms, lawyers, paid-off journalists."
Reaper leaned in from the dark. "Three years of donation records. Every time Crest’s PAC gets a surge, Blackdawn grows. New sites. New vans. More bodies."
"So he’s not just shieldin’ them," I muttered. "He’s bankrollin’ ‘em."
Kieran folded his arms. "And the public sees him as a saint. Anti-trafficking bills, prison reform, defense budget cuts. He’s the poster boy for progress."
"And he’s the thread," I said. "Pull him, the rest unravels. "
Silence hung heavy.
Then Seraphina spoke. "We can’t take him head-on. Not yet. But we don’t have to. We just need to draw blood."
I looked at her. That calm fury humming under her skin. She wasn’t the girl from that alley anymore. She was the storm her da tried to chain.
"We start with his secrets," I said. "The ones he thought were buried too deep to dig up."
Emerson nodded from the corner. "I know just where to look."
No smiles. No cheers.
We got to work.
Men like Julian Crest don’t flinch from words.
They only understand pressure.