Chapter Seven

COLE'S POV

The address I send her is a storage unit I've rented under Milo's name for eight months.

Not glamorous. Twelve by twelve feet, a folding table, two chairs, a lamp I brought from my apartment, and three locked boxes that contain everything I've been quietly pulling from the organization's internal systems since I realized my father wasn't just cutting corners — he was dismantling something deliberately.

I get there an hour before her and unlock everything and spread it out in the order I want her to see it.

I'm not nervous. I don't get nervous before games, before press, before my father's interrogations dressed as conversations. But I stand in that room and look at eight months of careful, solitary work laid out on a folding table and something in my chest pulls tight.

This is the part where it becomes real for someone other than me.

She arrives exactly on time. Knocks twice, which I didn't ask her to do, but it's very her — announcing herself without waiting for permission. I unlock the door and she steps in and looks at everything on the table without touching it.

"How long did this take you?" she asks.

"Since last September."

She looks up. "You've been building this alone for eight months."

"Yes."

She doesn't say anything sympathetic about that, which I appreciate. She just pulls out the chair and sits down and picks up the first document.

I let her read.

**********************

She works the way I expected, quietly, occasionally making a note in the small book she brought. She doesn't ask questions while she's reading. She finishes one document and moves to the next and builds the picture herself piece by piece and I sit across from her and watch her understand it.

Twenty minutes in she stops.

She puts down the page she's holding and looks at me.

"The youth foundation," she says.

"Yes."

"The same one where my mother met Richard."

"Yes."

She's very still. "The foundation is the original vehicle. It's not just where the money ends up — it's where it starts. They run clean donor money in, skim the top through Lorne's consulting arrangement, filter the rest into the subsidiary contracts, and what comes out the other side looks like legitimate operational funding for the organization."

"The foundation has been running it for four years," I say. "Before Lorne. Before the hockey contracts. It predates all of it."

"Your father built this before you were even playing professionally."

"He built it when I started getting drafted interest. When he knew there was going to be real money attached to my name." I keep my voice even. "The foundation uses my endorsement history as part of its public profile. Every charity event I've attended, every press appearance — it's all woven into the legitimacy of the structure."

She looks at me for a long moment. "He built a fraud around you."

"Yes."

"And attached your name to it so that any investigation risks blowing back on you personally."

"Which is why no one inside the organization has touched it. And why Lorne put a junior journalist on the story instead of someone senior enough to push it through independently." I lean forward. "He needed someone smart enough to find the right threads but controllable enough to be stopped before she pulled them."

"He underestimated me."

"Significantly."

She looks back at the documents and I watch her make the connections faster than I expected — which is saying something because I expected her to be fast.

"Theo Wren's signature is on four of these subsidiary approvals," she says.

"He's the operational layer. My father sets the architecture, Lorne provides media cover, Wren executes."

"And Nadia?" She says the name carefully, not like she's jealous — like she already suspects and is confirming. "You said she's been using what she knows as leverage."

"She found one of the early contracts two years ago. She didn't understand the full structure but she understood enough. She's been sitting on it." I pause. "Nadia doesn't want to burn it. She wants to stay close enough to the money to benefit from it long-term. She's not a threat to the investigation unless she realizes you're close."

"Does she know about the gala?"

The question lands differently than she intends it to. She asks it like it's tactical — does Nadia have information that compromises us — but it sits in the room with more weight than that.

"No," I say.

"Does anyone?"

"Milo."

She absorbs that. "What does he know exactly?"

"That I met someone at the gala and that it didn't resolve the way I wanted it to."

She looks at me steadily. "And what way did you want it to resolve?"

I don't answer immediately because she's asking me something real and she knows it and I know it and this small room with its folding table and its careful evidence of everything my father built around me is probably the most honest space I've been in for years.

"I wanted to know who you were," I say. "I looked for you the next morning."

Something moves across her face. "You knew at the wedding."

"The moment you walked in."

"And you said nothing."

"What was I supposed to say? In front of our parents, at their wedding?"

She stands up and walks to the far end of the table and puts distance between us the way she always does when something gets too close to the center of it. I let her.

"This doesn't change anything," she says.

"I know."

"The investigation is the priority."

"I agree."

She turns around. "Cole."

"Vera."

"Stop looking at me like that."

"I'm sitting still."

"You know what you're doing."

I do. And she knows I know. And we are both fully aware that the documents on this table are the only reason either of us is maintaining any distance at all.

"Take everything," I say. "Photograph it all. I'll give you the drive too — there are digital files that corroborate the paper trail."

She nods and pulls out her phone.

"We go back separately," I say.

"Obviously."

"And tonight at dinner you treat me like you mildly tolerate me."

She almost smiles. "That won't be hard."

"Devastating," I say.

This time she does smile, small, gone before it fully arrives.

She picks up the first document and starts photographing.

I watch her work and say nothing and somewhere underneath the eight months of careful architecture on that table is the simpler, more inconvenient truth.

I didn't bring her here just because she was the right journalist.

I brought her here because she was the only person I trusted enough.