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Laurent wasn’t only bitter about being left out. He was watching the family, listening to conversations that weren’t meant for him, and preparing for something.

“So you flew across the ocean to tell me Laurent is listening?”

“No.”

Marcel reached inside his jacket, pulled out a folded document, and slid it across my desk.

“Read.”

I opened it.

At first, I thought I was looking at business records. There were names, dates, properties, and information tied to different members of the Delacroix family. The farther I read, the clearer it became that none of this was about business.

These were records of shit my family had buried.

There were abuse allegations, rape allegations covered with money, women paid to disappear, employees silenced, and boys sent away to private schools after incidents nobody wanted attached to the Delacroix name.

I turned the page.

There was more.

Old men I had known my entire life were on there. Board members, advisors, investors, relatives who smiled in my face at family dinners and acted as if being a Delacroix made them better than everybody else.

Marcel had notes under every name.

Decades of fucked-up shit had been protected by money and our last name.

“What the fuck is this?”

Marcel watched me. “You want to clean this family?”

“Yes.”

“Then start there.”

I looked at him. “These are Delacroix men.”

“I know.”

“Some of these niggas are your brothers and cousins.”

“Some were.”

“You’re asking me to kill members of our own family?”

“I’m asking you to remove the rot.”

I went through more of the pages. Marcel hadn’t put this together recently. There were too many dates and too much information. He had been collecting this shit for years, maybe decades, while these men continued moving around as if nothing could touch them.

“Why didn’t you handle this yourself?”

“Politics.”

“Meaning?”

“Power requires alliances. Some of these men were connected to business deals, government contracts, and old favors that were important at the time.”

I waited because that didn’t answer everything.