050: Following the Money

By morning, Damian's security team had a location.

Not a home address — Marcus Reyes hadn't lived anywhere long enough to leave a paper trail worth following. But he had a habit of using the same private mail service every few weeks, a small storefront wedged between a dry cleaner and a shuttered bakery on the edge of the industrial district.

"It's not much," the head of security admitted, sliding a folder across Damian's desk. "But it's the only thread that's actually moved in three days."

Elena reached for the folder before Damian could. "Then we pull it."

"Elena—"

"I'm not asking you to let me go alone." She met his eyes. "I'm telling you I'm coming."

Damian studied her for a long moment, the way he did when he was deciding whether to fight her or trust her. He chose trust. He usually did, these days.

"Fine," he said. "But we do this quietly. If Marcus knows we're looking, he disappears."

The mail service was smaller than the photograph suggested, lit by a single flickering sign and run by a woman old enough to have seen every kind of trouble walk through her door and stopped being surprised by any of it.

Damian didn't waste time on subtlety. He set a folded bill on the counter, heavier than the errand required.

"We're looking for a man who rents a box here. Marcus Reyes."

The woman didn't touch the money. She looked at Elena instead — really looked, the particular attention of someone deciding whether a face was worth remembering.

"You're the Vale girl," she said. "The one from the news."

Elena's stomach tightened. "Yes."

"He asked about you." The woman's voice had gone quieter, almost careful. "The man you're looking for. Came in maybe two weeks ago, before any of this hit the papers, asking if we'd gotten any mail addressed to an Elena Vale. Like he already knew the name was coming back."

Damian went very still beside her. "Before the story broke."

"Before anybody knew to look for that name, far as I could tell." The woman finally slid the bill toward herself, folding it once. "He hasn't picked up his box in four days. That's the longest he's gone without checking it since he started renting here."

"Do you have an address on file? Anything?"

"Post office box only. Cash payments." She hesitated, then reached beneath the counter and produced a slim stack of unopened mail, rubber-banded together. "This is what's piled up. I shouldn't be showing you this."

"Then don't," Damian said quietly, and set another bill down beside the first.

They went through the stack in the car, Elena's hands steady even as her pulse wasn't.

Bills. A subscription renewal. Nothing useful, until the second-to-last envelope — thick, official, postmarked from a private bank Elena recognized instantly because her grandfather used the same one.

She broke the seal before Damian could stop her.

Inside was a statement. Not for Marcus Reyes.

For an account held in trust, funded quarterly, for the last seven years.

The account holder's name made Elena's breath stop entirely.

*Katherine Vale.*

"That's not possible," she whispered. "My aunt died the same year I disappeared. Before the assassination attempt, even. She had a heart condition. I was at the funeral."

Damian took the statement from her shaking hands and read it twice, his expression sharpening into something Elena hadn't seen from him before — not anger, not surprise. Recognition, arriving late and unwelcome.

"Elena." His voice had dropped low. "What if she didn't die of a heart condition."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying someone has been funding Marcus Reyes for seven years through an account that's supposed to belong to a dead woman." He turned the statement toward her, tapping the routing details at the bottom. "And I'm saying the bank managing that trust is the same one your grandfather has used for thirty years."

Elena felt the world narrow to the sound of her own heartbeat.

"You think my grandfather is involved."

"I think," Damian said carefully, "that your grandfather has spent seven years telling you he doesn't know who's behind any of this. And I think it's time we found out whether that was ever true."

Elena stared out the window at the mail service shrinking behind them, at the city that had spent a decade calling her dead while someone quietly kept paying to make sure she stayed that way.

"Take me home," she said. "It's time he answered for real."