Chapter 13 - The Ledger Thief
The thief had been inside Dominic’s team.
There was no other explanation.
The ledger had been under Mave’s coat before the explosion.
Now it was gone.
Dominic lined up his surviving men outside the warehouse.
No one spoke.
Marco sat in an ambulance refusing transport.
Rain struck the pavement in silver lines.
Mave studied the men.
Victor was not among them.
Dominic noticed at the same moment.
“Where’s Victor?”
No one answered.
One guard looked toward the west gate.
Dominic ran.
Mave followed.
They found Victor’s jacket near a drainage ditch.
Blood marked the sleeve.
No body.
No ledger.
Dominic cursed.
Mave crouched beside the jacket.
A torn paper corner stuck from the pocket.
She pulled it free.
Numbers.
Container codes.
And one address in Brooklyn.
Marco saw it and went pale.
Dominic looked at him.
“You know it.”
Marco nodded.
“It was Dad’s old house.”
Dominic stared.
“My father never owned property in Brooklyn.”
Marco looked away.
Mave caught it.
“You knew.”
Marco’s silence was enough.
Dominic stepped toward his brother.
“What did you know?”
Marco’s jaw tightened.
“Not here.”
Dominic grabbed his coat.
“Now.”
Marco shoved him back.
For one second, the brothers looked ready to kill each other.
Then Marco said, “Dad didn’t die in 2003.”
Dominic stopped.
Rain ran down his face.
Marco continued.
“He disappeared.”
“You told me he was dead.”
“I was seventeen.”
“You helped bury him.”
“I helped bury an empty box.”
Dominic hit him.
Marco fell against the ambulance.
Mave stepped between them.
“Enough.”
Dominic looked at her with murder in his eyes.
Mave did not move.
“We need the ledger.”
Marco wiped blood from his mouth.
“He went to Brooklyn.”
“Who?” Dominic asked.
Marco looked at Mave.
“Our father.”
Mave felt cold despite the rain.
“Is he alive?”
Marco swallowed.
“I don’t know.”
Dominic laughed once, bitterly.
“That’s everyone’s favorite answer tonight.”
Mave looked at the address.
Then at the torn paper.
Something bothered her.
The handwriting was too neat.
Too intentionally left behind.
“This is bait.”
Dominic nodded.
“Yes.”
Mave folded the paper.
“We’re still going.”
Dominic looked at her.
“Yes.”
Because some traps were designed to be avoided.
Mave's hearing returned in fragments after the blast.
First the rain.
Then Dominic shouting.
Then Marco coughing.
Finally the distant wail of a siren.
Her left ear rang so sharply that every voice sounded underwater.
She touched the side of her head.
No blood.
Dominic had blood on his cheek and glass in his sleeve.
He ignored both.
“The ledger.”
Mave reached inside her coat.
Nothing.
Her stomach dropped.
Dominic checked the floor.
No book.
One of his guards swore.
Marco looked toward the open loading bay.
A shadow moved beyond the rain.
Dominic fired once.
The shadow disappeared.
They found Victor's jacket minutes later.
Mave crouched beside it while Dominic's men spread through the yard.
The blood on the sleeve looked dark but oddly uniform.
She touched the edge with a gloved finger.
Dominic frowned.
“What?”
“Too sticky.”
“Blood is sticky.”
“Not like this.”
She smelled it.
Corn syrup.
Stage blood.
Mave stood.
“Victor wasn't shot.”
Dominic searched his own people twice before Mave asked him to stop.
Anger was making him predictable.
The Archive had counted on that from the beginning.
Victor's disappearance gave Dominic an obvious traitor, and obvious traitors were useful because they absorbed suspicion from everyone less obvious.
Mave asked each surviving guard the same question in a different language.
Not because she expected answers in those languages.
Because confusion changed timing.
Liars often prepared for the words they expected, not the pause before unfamiliar ones.
One guard named Salvatore reacted to a Serbian phrase before Mave translated it.
He claimed he had heard Serbian in prison.
Mave asked which prison.
He named a facility that had closed before he was born.
Dominic stepped toward him.
Mave raised one hand.
"Not yet."
She asked Salvatore about the warehouse.
He denied ever visiting it.
Then she referred to Container 4B as the blue container.
Salvatore corrected her.
"It was green."
Silence.
His face collapsed when he realized what he had done.
Dominic's men grabbed him.
Salvatore began shouting that Victor had forced him to cooperate.
He said Victor threatened his daughter.
He said the ledger theft had been planned only to keep Mave moving toward the Archive server.
He insisted he had never agreed to hurt anyone.
Dominic wanted to know where the original ledger was.
Salvatore said Victor had taken it to Brooklyn.
Mave asked why Brooklyn.
Salvatore described a townhouse used years earlier by an Archive handler called Rafael.
The name meant nothing to Dominic.
It meant something to Mave.
Rafael had been the maintenance man in Building C.
He fixed heaters, replaced locks, and handed children candy when guards were not watching.
Mave had trusted him more than almost any adult there.
She had also watched him disappear the same week the east wing closed.
"Rafael Moreau?"
Salvatore stared at her.
"He used Moreau sometimes."
Mave's stomach tightened.
Moreau was her mother's maiden name.
Dominic heard the implication.
"Family?"
"Maybe."
She hated how often that word had entered the night.
Salvatore offered an address in exchange for protection.
Dominic gave him no promise.
They loaded the hostages into one SUV and sent Adrian with two loyal men toward a private doctor.
Mave watched Dominic hug his brother before the doors closed.
It was quick, almost embarrassed.
The gesture made him more dangerous to her in a different way.
He was becoming human at precisely the moment she needed emotional distance.
Dominic caught her looking.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"That was a bad translation."
Despite everything, Mave almost smiled.
"I said nothing."
"You meant something."
She looked toward the Brooklyn address on Salvatore's phone.
"I meant that every person tonight has used family as leverage."
Dominic's expression changed.
"And you think I will too?"
"I think people rarely notice when they become the thing they hate."
He did not answer.
For the first time, Mave saw that the warning frightened him more than an accusation would have.
Salvatore kept asking whether Dominic would protect his daughter.
Dominic refused to promise anything he could not verify.
Mave respected that more than mercy performed for appearance.
She asked Salvatore for his daughter's name.
He hesitated.
Mave understood why.
Every name spoken tonight had become leverage.
Finally he whispered, "Gianna."
Mave wrote nothing down.
"Where is she?"
Salvatore said college in Boston.
Victor had sent him photographs of Gianna outside her dorm, at a cafe, and on a train platform.
The threat had never been explicit.
It had not needed to be.
Mave saw the pattern again.
The Archive and Victor both preferred implication because victims completed the terror themselves.
Dominic ordered one trusted man to verify Gianna's safety without contacting her.
Salvatore began crying when the report came back that she was alive and unaware.
For the first time, Mave saw how Victor recruited betrayal.
Not with loyalty.
With imagination.
He let people picture the worst outcome and then offered himself as the only person who could prevent it.
Dominic's expression hardened.
Marco stared.
“You sure?”
Mave held up her glove.
“Unless your people bleed vanilla.”
Dominic looked at the torn address in Victor's pocket.
Now the bait was undeniable.
Victor wanted them in Brooklyn.
That meant one of two things.
Either he needed time elsewhere.
Or he needed them to see something there.
Dominic wanted to split the team.
Mave objected.
“If he controls information, splitting us helps him.”
Dominic looked irritated.
“He also wants us together if there's a bomb.”
Mave considered that.
“Fair.”
Marco laughed weakly despite himself.
Dominic glared at both of them.
It was the first moment all night that felt almost human.
Then Marco admitted the truth about Rafael.
The humor vanished.
Dominic's punch sent Marco into the ambulance door.
Mave stepped between them because no one else dared.
Dominic's eyes were wild now.
Not mafia-boss stillness.
Son fury.
“You knew for twenty-three years.”
Marco wiped his mouth.
“I knew he left alive.”
“That is knowing.”
“I didn't know where.”
“You let me bury him.”
“I was ordered to.”
“By who?”
Marco looked at the rain.
Mave saw the answer before he spoke.
“Mom.”
Dominic stepped back as if struck.
Their mother had died six years earlier.
Another dead parent suddenly dragged into the night.
Mave almost laughed at the grotesque pattern.
Marco explained that Rafael had disappeared because a war inside the Archive had reached the Rossy family.
He had believed leaving would protect the children.
Their mother had staged the funeral.
Marco had been told because he accidentally saw Rafael leave the house after midnight.
Dominic had been kept ignorant.
“Why me?” Dominic asked.
Marco looked ashamed.
“Dad said you couldn't lie convincingly.”
Mave glanced at Dominic.
That was almost funny.
Dominic did not find it funny.
“He let me grieve him because I was honest.”
Marco said nothing.
Mave understood the rage.
Sometimes the traits adults praised in children became the exact reasons those children were excluded from truth.
Dominic looked at the Brooklyn address.
“Did you know about this house?”
Marco hesitated.
“Yes.”
Dominic laughed once.
Mave stepped closer before the second punch.
“Save it.”
Dominic looked at her.
“For Victor.”
That redirected the anger just enough.
They moved toward the SUVs.
Mave looked back at the warehouse.
The rain washed fake blood off Victor's abandoned jacket and carried red streaks into the gutter.
A theatrical death beside a real conspiracy.
The Archive loved symbolism.
May you like
Mave was beginning to hate symbolism almost as much as bad translation.
And some were designed for people who had already run out of places to hide.
