Chapter 6 - The Audit of the West Side
By 2:00 AM, the sub-basement vault was dead silent, save for the clicking of my keyboard and the soft hum of the cooling fans.
Adrian sat in the leather armchair in the corner, watching me with unblinking patience. He hadn't left the room in six hours. Twice, Mrs. Gable had brought him coffee; both times, he had set it on my desk without a word, watching my eyes dart across the dual monitors as I broke through the double-encryption protocols of Vance’s offshore accounts.
"Got it," I whispered.
Marcus, who had been dozing against the wall, snapped awake. "Did you find the burner account?"
"Better," I said, hitting a final keystroke and spinning the monitor toward them. "I didn't just find the burner account. I found the real-time GPS telemetry of the cellular device used to detonate the thermite remote trigger. It belongs to a man named Dominic Vance—Councilman Vance’s nephew and the registered manager of Apex Grain."
Dante whistled, stepping closer to the screen. "The Councilman’s nephew? That’s an act of war against the city council, Ad. If we move on Dominic Vance, the cops will be all over our shipping lanes within an hour."
Adrian stood up from his chair. He didn't look at the screen. He looked at me.
"We aren't going to shoot him, Dante," Adrian said, his voice dropping into that quiet, gravelly register that made his own brothers take half a step back. "We're going to bankrupt him."
"Bankrupt him?" Marcus scoffed. "He’s got a ten-million-dollar war chest from the city council development funds!"
"Not anymore," I said, smiling faintly as I clicked open a secondary browser window. "Thirty minutes ago, using my father’s old banking credentials—which Vance’s office foolishly forgot to revoke when they seized the Wacker Drive accounts—I executed an emergency administrative freeze on Apex Grain's primary municipal operating fund. Every dollar Dominic Vance used to buy that thermite is currently sitting in a frozen escrow account belonging to the City of Chicago."
Dante stared at me, his mouth slightly open. "You... you locked up his municipal funds? Just like that?"
"It’s not magic, Dante," I said, standing up and stretching my aching shoulders. "It’s basic forensic accounting. When you steal from a city council development fund, you leave a digital footprint the size of a tractor tire. All I had to do was point the comptroller's office in the right direction."
Adrian walked around the desk until he was standing two feet from me. In the harsh fluorescent light of the vault, the rust-colored stain on his cuff was gone, replaced by a fresh, clean shirt, but the deep, exhausted lines around his eyes remained.
"You didn't just protect my shipping lanes, Talia," Adrian said softly, his voice dropping so low that Marcus and Dante tactfully turned their backs to examine the tactical map. "You just saved us from a municipal war."
"I protected my investment, Mr. Salerno," I replied, meeting his gray gaze with an unyielding chin. "If your docks burn down, my fifty million dollar Swiss account gets complicated."
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A slow, genuine smile broke across Adrian’s face—a rare, magnificent transformation that made him look ten years younger.
"Your Swiss account is already fully funded, Talia," he murmured. "It cleared Zurich at midnight. You are officially a very wealthy, very dangerous woman."
