Se connecterThe casting sessions ran for five days. By the end Grace had twelve women confirmed for the collection. She had also submitted three new witness accounts to Diaz's team, had connected two women with Rachel's legal network, and had started a conversation with Emma about what the infrastructure supporting all of this should actually look like going forward. The something she was building was becoming more specific. She could see its shape now. Not fully — she was not the kind of person who needed to see the full shape before she started. She was the kind of person who started and let the shape emerge from the doing of it. But the outline was there. The purpose was clear. She knew what it needed to be, even if she did not yet know all of what it would require. She worked on the collection designs in the mornings. She worked on the rest in the afternoons. She slept, which was still something she had to remind herself to do, but she slept more than she had in over a year. On the Fr
The text from Emma arrived at eight in the morning. Grace was in the studio, first coffee still hot, sketchbook open to a page she had been working on for three days. She had been ignoring her phone for the first hour of the morning as a deliberate practice — she had started doing this after the verdict, reclaiming the early hours as time that belonged to the work rather than to the machinery around it. She read the text. 400 unread emails. And then: a major fashion house wants to collaborate. Survivor-themed collection. They're asking for you specifically to lead it. Call me when you're awake. Grace looked at her coffee. She called Emma. "They reached out three days ago," Emma said. "I've been sitting on it because I didn't want to put it in front of you until things had settled slightly. But they've followed up twice and they're serious." She paused. "It's a significant house. International reach. Their creative director wrote the email herself — not an assistant, her. She wa
The arrests began forty-eight hours after the forum.Diaz called Grace at six in the morning. She had clearly been awake for some time."The recordings were clean," Diaz said. "Both associates, everything you captured. The legal team confirmed admissibility last night and we coordinated with Interpol and the European units through the early hours." A pause. "It started moving at four AM."Grace sat up."Romania," Diaz said. "Germany. Cyprus. And this morning, UK and France."She listed them. Two senior Volkov network operatives, both of whose names Grace recognised from Diaz's briefing documents. Three financial intermediaries — the people who had moved money through the legitimate business fronts for years, who had signed the paperwork and processed the transfers and told themselves they were accountants rather than participants. One government official whose name Grace did not recognise but whose role Diaz described in two sentences that made the scope of it clear.Six arrests acros
The forum was held in a hotel that understood its clientele.Understated in the way that very expensive things were understated. Good light, good proportion, the kind of room that held two hundred people without feeling crowded. Grace had been here before. She knew the layout. She knew the rhythms of this kind of event — the morning sessions that everyone attended and the breaks where the real conversations happened.She arrived at ten.Diaz's team was outside, in the lobby café, in the car park. Two of them were registered attendees in professional capacity, which was legitimate — they had been in the industry long enough to have credible cover. They were not there to intervene. They were there to be available if something went wrong and to receive the recording afterwards.Nothing was going to go wrong.Grace knew it the way she knew design lines now — not arrogance, just the specific confidence of someone who had spent two years being underestimated and had learned to move inside t
The trade event was twelve days away.The International Luxury Goods and Textiles Forum ran annually and had been running for nineteen years. It was the kind of event that existed in the upper register of the industry — invitation only, heavily networked, the place where relationships between manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and investors were maintained and extended.Diaz had been watching it for three years.Two confirmed Volkov network associates attended regularly. A third had been at the last two events. The network used the forum the way it used everything — as legitimate cover, a place where financial conversations could happen in the margins of professional ones and no one asked why certain people knew each other.Grace had attended four times. She had been invited again this year. The invitation had arrived before the trial, before any of this, as a matter of professional routine.She had not yet responded.---Diaz laid it out at the penthouse with two members of her
Priya talked for two hours.They missed the flight.Grace had known within the first ten minutes that they would miss the flight and she had not said anything about it and Aiden had not said anything about it and Priya had not known and had apologised three times when she eventually understood, each time more distressed than the last, and Grace had told her each time that it was not something to apologise for.They found a quieter section of the terminal. A row of seats away from the main flow of the concourse. Aiden went and got water and coffee and came back and sat slightly apart from them, present but not intrusive, which was correct.Priya talked.The Volkov network's reach into the textile and fashion industry was broader than even Grace had understood from her own case. The supply chain infiltration was not limited to a handful of companies. It was structural. It had been built deliberately across two decades to be structural, to be embedded at a level where removing it require







