CHAPTER 48: The Name

POV: Avalon Pierce

The name on the filing was Thomas Reeves.

Avalon read it twice. Then he said it out loud because sometimes that’s the only way to make something real at 2 AM.

“Thomas.”

Selene didn’t respond, she just watched him process it.

Thomas Reeves had spent thirty-one years on the Pierce Holdings board, the same man who’d voted NO on Vincent’s acquisition when it mattered most. He had said, quietly and with apparent conviction, that Nene would have wanted Avalon to control the company.

Who’d helped them?

Or appeared to.

“He’s the anonymous helper,” Avalon said.

“Has to be.” Selene scrolled through the filing again. “He started accumulating six months ago. Small enough to stay below disclosure thresholds. But look at the timing — right when Hale’s surveillance of the company would have started making someone who was paying attention very nervous.”

“Thomas knew about Hale.”

“Thomas has been on that board for thirty-one years. He knew Nene, her lawyers, her advisors and who had access to what.” She closed the laptop. “He would have been one of the first to notice someone quietly building a position.”

Avalon leaned back.

He tried to fit the pieces together — the distorted voice, the files on Patricia, the forensic accountant referral, all of it from a man who sat at the board table twice a month, said very little, and watched everything.

“Why help us though?” Avalon said. “If he wanted the twelve per cent, why not let Hale win and acquire the whole thing at a discount?”

“Because Hale winning meant the company getting stripped for parts. Thomas doesn’t want a gutted company, he probably wants a share of a healthy one.” She looked at Avalon steadily. “He needed us to survive, so, he helped just enough to make sure we did.”

They sat with that.

“He used us,” Avalon said.

“Yes. And we need to tell him we know.”

Thomas answered on the fourth ring.

His voice was a clear indication that he had been awake.

Of course, he had.

“You found the filing,” he said, before Avalon could frame it as a question.

“Selene found it fourty minutes after the headline.”

A brief pause. “She’s sharp.”

“Come to my house,” Thomas said. “Seven AM. I’ll have coffee.”

He opened the door before they knocked.

He was already dressed, with silver hair, straight back. The physical composure of someone who’d spent decades in rooms where posture communicated everything.

The kitchen table had seen thirty years of serious conversations, and Avalon could somehow feel it.

“You’ve been the anonymous helper,” Avalon said, before Thomas could set the terms. 

Thomas wrapped his hands around his cup. “Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Since shortly after Marcus filed the lawsuit. I’d been tracking Hale’s share movements for months before that — small acquisitions, always just below disclosure thresholds. When I finally traced it back to him, I understood what was happening.” He paused. “He knew about Nene’s will, apparently, one of her estate lawyers had a relationship with one of Hale’s associates and information was passed for money.”

“You could have come to us directly,” Selene said.

“I needed to see who you were first.”

“And?”

Thomas looked at her. “The depositions. Avalon’s second day specifically. I had to obtain the transcript.” A pause. “What he said — about loving you before he’d told you, about being terrified of losing something real — that’s not something you perform under oath. That’s a man who’s run out of room for anything but the truth.” He looked at Avalon. “I decided you were worth the risk.”

The kitchen was quiet.

“The twelve per cent,” Avalon said. “What are you planning?”

“Hale’s assets will be frozen pending trial. His position becomes legally encumbered. The market will move when it opens and I intend to acquire as much of that stake as possible before anyone else understands what’s available.” Thomas set down his cup. “Combined with my existing holdings, that gives me approximately eighteen per cent of Pierce Holdings.”

“Second largest individual shareholder after me,” Avalon said.

“Yes.”

“Why?” Selene asked. “You’re eighty-one. You could sell everything tomorrow.”

Thomas was quiet for a moment.

“I watched Nene build something genuinely worth protecting,” he said. “Not just financially. The way the company worked, what it stood for and when she died I was afraid it would become just another asset to be hollowed out.” He looked at Avalon. “I needed to know she’d chosen correctly.”

“And the twelve per cent is your insurance,” Avalon said.

“My investment in something I believe in.” A pause. “I’m not trying to control Pierce Holdings, I am only trying to protect it.”

“Is there a difference?” Selene said. “You ran an operation for six months that served your interests alongside ours. You used us, Thomas. Knowingly.”

“Yes,” he said. Without deflection.

The honesty of it landed harder than an argument would have.

“Would you have trusted me six months ago?” he asked. “If I’d called and explained that I was investigating a corporate raider while positioning myself to acquire his stake — would you have believed my motives were clean?”

Selene considered it honestly. “No.”

“Exactly.”

Avalon looked at him. “What do you want from us this morning?”

“Help moving on the stake before the market opens. Diana’s documentation for the federal case and a conversation about what the board looks like when all of this is over.” Thomas paused. “Nothing that isn’t already in your interest.”

Avalon looked at Selene.

She gave him a your call look.

“We work together,” Avalon said. “But no more operating independently, whatever you know, we know. Whatever you’re planning, we discuss first.”

Thomas looked at him for a moment before agreeing.

Back in the car, Selene’s phone rang.

Diana.

She listened. Hung up.

“The FBI contacted her,” she said. “They want full cooperation on the Hale prosecution. In exchange—”

“A deal.”

“She wants to know what we think.”

Avalon stared through the windshield at the brightening street.

Diana…..Who betrayed them? Who’d spent months trying to fix it from the shadows was now being handed a way out that depended partly on their willingness to let her take it.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Selene was quiet for a moment.

“I think carrying it doesn’t serve anyone,” she said. “Not us or her.” A pause. “Tell her to take it.”

He called Diana.

“Take the deal,” he said. “Cooperate fully.” He paused. “And Diana — after this is over, don’t contact us.”

He hung up.

The city was fully awake now. The market would open in an hour, so whatever was going to happen with Hale’s twelve per cent was already beginning somewhere in the machinery of finance and federal prosecution.

Selene’s phone buzzed again.

As she read the message, her expression shifted in a way he couldn’t immediately read.

“What?” he said.

She turned the phone to face him.

It's a text from an unknown number.

Not distorted this time or anonymous this time.

It was a name they recognised. Someone outside the board or Diana, outside everyone they’d been looking at.

Someone who claimed to have evidence that Edward Hale’s arrest was more of a request than random, including the name of the person who’d requested it.

Was someone sitting at their own kitchen table right now?

Drinking coffee and waiting