Chapter 265: Chapter 267: The Signal
MARCUS’S POV
The alert came in at 4:17 AM.
He was still awake. That wasn’t unusual. Marcus had never been a good sleeper and the last two weeks had made him a worse one....the kind of nights where you lie down and your brain just keeps running, going over everything, looking for the thing you missed.
He was always looking for the thing he missed.
He heard the alert and was sitting up before he’d fully processed the sound. Reached for his laptop. Pulled the screen toward him in the dark of his room on the estate’s east corridor and read what the monitoring system had flagged.
Twenty million dollars.
Same shell network as before. Different account, new routing, someone had tried to make it look clean. Someone had almost succeeded.
Almost.
He sat with it for a minute. Just looked at the numbers and the routing path and the originating signature that the system had caught because he’d built the system specifically to catch it, six months ago when Harold Ashford had first appeared on their radar and he’d told Damien quietly that men like Harold always needed money and money always left a trail.
Twenty million this time.
The first transfer had been fifty thousand. He’d flagged it, traced it to Victoria in Sydney, reported it to Damien. Harold had gone quiet after that.....either spooked or careful or both. No movement. No transactions. Three weeks of nothing that had felt less like safety and more like held breath.
Now this.
Twenty million didn’t say I need to stay hidden.
Twenty million said I’m about to do something.
Marcus got up and went to his desk.
It took him four hours.
The routing was good....whoever had set it up knew what they were doing, had layered it through three jurisdictions and two different financial systems that didn’t talk to each other. If he’d been running standard monitoring he would have lost it at the second layer.
He wasn’t running standard monitoring.
He pulled the thread. Carefully, methodically, the way he did everything....not fast, not impatient, just steady and thorough. One layer at a time. He’d learned patience in a different life, in rooms that weren’t this comfortable, doing things that weren’t this clean, and it had given him a particular quality of focus that he’d never entirely been able to turn off.
He didn’t want to turn it off.
The money had moved through a Luxembourg account to a private bank in Singapore and then....and this was where whoever had set it up had made their mistake....through a payment processor that Marcus had flagged eighteen months ago because it had handled three transactions connected to people in Harold’s network.
A flag didn’t mean a trace.
But it meant a door.
He went through the door.
By seven AM he had a name. Not Harold’s name....Harold was too careful for that. But a name connected to a credit card connected to a booking at a motel outside a small town in Nevada that had been paid for in the kind of rotating weekly increments that said someone is living here and doesn’t want anyone to know.
He sat back in his chair.
Looked at the screen.
Picked up his phone.
****
DAMIEN’S POV
He was in the kitchen when Marcus called.
Aria was still asleep. He’d been up since six....old habit, and he’d come down and made coffee and stood at the kitchen window looking out at the grounds in the early morning light. The estate was quiet. That was still something he was adjusting to....the quiet of it, the way it felt different now that she was in it. Like the rooms had a different quality. Like the space meant something it hadn’t meant before.
He picked up on the first ring.
"Talk to me," he said.
"Twenty million," Marcus said. "Came through overnight. Different routing than the first transfer but same network signature." A pause. "Victoria sent it from Sydney. Harold received it through a shell chain in Luxembourg and Singapore."
Damien set his coffee down.
"He’s moving," Marcus said. "Twenty million isn’t maintenance money. He’s preparing for something."
"Where is he?"
"Nevada. Small town called Pioche. There’s a motel on the edge of town...the Clearwater. A room’s been booked under the name Daniel Marsh rotating weekly for the last six weeks." Another pause. "Daniel Marsh doesn’t exist. The credit card is connected to an account that Victoria’s money touched."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Damien looked at the window. The grounds. The long clean lines of the estate in the morning light that he had built and secured and apparently not secured sufficiently because a man who had tried to kill the woman sleeping upstairs had been sitting in a motel in Nevada for six weeks and he was only finding out now.
"You’re certain," he said.
"Ninety percent." Marcus’s voice was even. "I want another hour to close the last gaps. But it’s him."
"One hour," Damien said. "Then we talk."
He hung up.
Stood there for a moment.
He picked his coffee back up. Drank it. Looked at the window.
Then he put the cup in the sink and went to find Marcus.
*****
ARIA’S POV
She noticed at breakfast.
Not immediately....she was distracted herself, a text from the hospital about a patient case she’d been following before everything happened, her mind half in the surgery details she’d been away from for two weeks. She was eating toast and reading the update on her phone when she looked up and caught Damien’s face.
He was watching Marcus.
And she knew that look.
She’d been on the receiving end of it enough times to have memorized it completely.
She put her phone down.
"What’s happening?" she said.
He looked at her. "Nothing you need to...."
"Damien."
The table was quiet. Marcus was looking at his own coffee. Her mother, who had stayed the night in the guest suite and appeared at breakfast.
"We have a development," Damien said. "Marcus and I are going to go through it properly this morning. I’ll tell you everything after."
"After what?"
"After I know the full picture."
She looked at him. He met her eyes without flinching, which was what he always did, He never tried to pretend he wasn’t keeping something from her. He just held her gaze and she could see it in him, the effort of the balance. Telling her. Protecting her. The two things he was always trying to reconcile.
"Full picture," she said. "After."
"After," he confirmed.
She picked her phone back up. Went back to the patient update. Felt him watching her for a moment before the conversation at the table moved on.
She was not as settled as she was making herself look.
