Chapter 9: Due Diligence

Roman called Garrett Finch on Friday morning.

Garrett had been Ashford Global's legal counsel for eleven years. He answered on the second ring, the way he always answered, like he had been expecting it.

"I need a full brief on Montague Industries," Roman said. "Holdings, structure, key personnel. Everything you can put together."

A pause. Not long. Garrett was not a man who let silences stretch, which made the pause noticeable.

"Sir," he said carefully. "Montague isn't a company you investigate casually."

"I'm aware."

"They have relationships with certain parties who take an interest in that kind of inquiry. Even through legitimate channels, it tends to get noticed."

"Garrett."

The second pause was shorter. "Give me until Wednesday."

He called back Tuesday afternoon and asked to meet in person. That told Roman two things: the brief was more than expected, and Garrett did not want it discussed over a phone line.

They met at four. Garrett came in with a folder under his arm, set it on Roman's desk, and sat down with the careful expression of a man who had spent two days deciding how to frame something.

"This is partial," he said, before Roman could open it. "What's in there is what I could access without raising flags. The full picture is considerably larger."

Roman opened the folder.

The first page was a company overview. Montague Industries, founded by Savio Montague, third-generation family enterprise. Legitimate holdings across real estate, private equity, shipping logistics, and import operations. Current estimated value of disclosed assets: three point two billion dollars. Shadow affiliations and undisclosed holdings: significant. The brief did not elaborate, which meant Garrett either could not access specifics or had chosen not to write them down.

Family reputation: disputes resolved privately. Not a company people moved against twice.

Roman turned the page.

Seraphina Montague. Educated in London and Geneva. Returned to the United States at twenty-two. Entered Montague operations immediately. By twenty-four, according to sourced contacts, she was running shadow operations directly.

Roman stopped at twenty-four.

She had been twenty-three when they met. He had walked into a charity dinner and found her standing slightly apart from the room, and he had thought she was shy. He had introduced himself and she had shaken his hand and said her name and smiled at him in that particular way she had, like she found him interesting but was not going to tell him so, and he had spent the rest of the evening engineering reasons to be in the same part of the room as her.

He turned the page.

A photograph, printed on standard paper, grainy from a secondary source. A conference room table, long and dark. Six men seated along one side. Two more standing near the back wall. All of them older, fifties and sixties, the kind of faces that had been in boardrooms for decades and knew how to hold the power in them.

Sera sat at the head of the table.

Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five. One hand flat on the table, a folder open in front of her, her mouth mid-sentence. Every person in that room was looking at her with the focused, slightly careful attention of people who understood that what she said next was going to determine something.

She was not presenting to them.

She was telling them what they were going to do.

Roman looked at the date stamp in the corner of the photograph.

Three years ago. Four months before he met her at the charity dinner, where she had stood slightly apart from the room and let him spend the whole evening thinking he was the one doing the noticing.

She had walked into that dinner already being this person. She had shaken his hand and smiled and let him construct whatever version of her he was going to construct, and she had never corrected it. Three years beside him. His household managed, his migraines accounted for, his company quietly protected, her family's operations running in the background the entire time. All of it, and she had never once asked him to look closer.

He did not know whether that said something about her or about him.

He looked at the photograph for a long time.

Garrett sat quietly across the desk. He did not fill the silence. He had been doing this long enough to know when to wait.

Roman set the photograph down and paged through the rest of the brief without reading it closely. Names, holdings, transaction summaries. All of it pointing toward the same conclusion. A woman who had known exactly who she was from the first night they met, and who had spent three years in his life being seen as something considerably smaller.

He closed the folder.

Garrett picked it up from the desk and tucked it back under his arm. He looked at Roman the way he looked at things he had decided to say directly.

"Sir." A beat. "Did you know who your wife was when you married her?"

Roman looked at him.

He had known her name. Her face. The way she held a coffee cup with both hands when she was reading. The specific quiet she went into when she was thinking something through. The way she laughed at things that were genuinely funny and did not perform laughing at things that were not. He had known, without cataloguing it, a hundred small specific things about her.

He had not known any of it was the surface of something much larger.

"I thought I did," Roman said.

Garrett nodded. He stood, straightened his jacket, and saw himself out.

Roman sat at his desk after the door closed and looked at the space where the folder had been.

…