Page 109 of Wells

I'm not fine. I'm functional, and functional is enough to do this. This is where I belong anyway, in the dark with the data, not out in some fucking park pretending to be a man who does yoga in the sun. That man got gutted. This one knows how to work.

Vin.

I've run the name a hundred times since the trust resolved to it last night, and it still won't fit in my mouth. He taught me how a manifest breathes the summer I was seventeen and too angry to sit in a classroom. He smoked my first cigar with me when I turned sixteen. There isn't a year of my life he isn't standing somewhere in, family in everything but blood, and not one of us ever looked at him twice, because why would we?

That's the part that won't go quiet. So I do the only thing that's ever quieted anything in me. I prove it.

I run the money down, and it ends where I already knew it would. Vin's trust funded the burner that called Ridge to the warehouse.

I peel the offshore layers off it one at a time. Underneath all of them is the same antiques company he's listed on his taxes for years, the little estate-furniture outfit that never clears a hundred grand, small enough to stay under the audits and clean on paper. There's provenance for every piece, market price for every sale.

It's too small. That's the tell. A business that size couldn't hold a tenth of what's moved through that trust. The furniture was never the side hustle hobby. It's the rinse.

So I stop chasing the money and start chasing the freight. I pull every load Vin personally signed off on over the last ten years and set the declared cargo against what actually crossed the docks. The gaps are tiny. A hundred kilos buried in a container of machine parts, two hundred in a load of textiles. Nothing a customs scale flags on that kind of volume. But they're there, and they're consistent, and they never stop.

Ten years of them run into the tons.

Product padded into other men's cargo, carried out the back of the cleanest shipping operation on the Gulf, sold offshore for cash, and washed home through a furniture company until it came out the far side looking like a quiet man with good taste.

I check for someone over him. A financier, a partner, a hand running the play from above. I strip it to the floor, and there's no one there.

Only Vin.

He built every dollar of it himself, alone, no one above him, standing at my father's right hand the whole time and calling us family.

And once the money makes it undeniable, the entire year rearranges itself in front of me, every dead end with its fingerprints on it.

It started with a shipment. Ten million of Vin's own money in fentanyl already on the water, a hundred million waiting on the far end, and the only thing between him and that payday was getting it through our port while my father was alive to read the manifests. My father started to see the shape of it before any of us did. That's what got him killed. He went quiet and hired a surveillance man off the books to photograph meetings he never explained to anyone, going around the one man whose entire job was watching the family's blind spots, which tells me he'd already started watching Vin. He meant to carry it alone until it was airtight. Vin figured it out first, and Dad died before he ever got to say the name.

Then Vin spent the next year making sure none of us said it either. He put Boudreaux in the room first, the rival my father had spent years circling, the easy enemy, and pointed us at him.

When that didn't hold, he engineered the thing with Coco, a kidnapping ugly enough to start a war, because a war between families is exactly the kind of noise a man can walk a container through. He didn't want us safe. He wanted us looking everywhere except at our own docks while his product cleared them.

Ridge didn't take the bait and didn't loosen a single control, and the shipment sat there exposed with Vin somewhere underneath it. So he went nuclear. He threw the Duvalls under the bus, a paper family he could dress up as the smugglers, and handed us a killer to bury along with them. It was the tidy story everyone wanted: drugs through Stone, a dead patriarch, a guilty name, and a clean ending.

We took it.

We put Duvall in the ground on Vin's word and closed the book, and he stood at the funeral with his hand on our shoulders while we buried the wrong story next to my father.

Every wrong turn, he was the one pointing. And I sat next to him and followed the money he wanted me to follow, straight to the door he picked out for me to knock on.

I close the laptop. The room is dark except for the window and the city beyond it. The proof is all there now, every dollar and every gap, and it changes nothing about the only fact that matters, the one I knew before I opened a single file.

The man who raised half of me killed the man who made me.

I reach for the pack, and my hand is shaking. I light one anyway and stare at the black glass.

I stand in Ridge's doorway and make myself cross it before I can think too hard about what I'm doing. I've never brought him a problem I couldn't solve alone. I'm about to break my own rule and hand him the worst thing I've ever found.

Ridge looks up from his desk. He reads my face in a second and closes the file in front of him.

"What is it?"

I step in and shut the door.

"You need to see this."

He leans back, brow drawn, already braced. He knows the look. Whatever I'm carrying is going to take something down with it.