All Chapters of Worth it: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Rain slicked the alley outside club Vesper, turning the neon signs into rivers of pink and blue. Aria Cole pulled her hood tighter and checked the time on her phone, 11:58 p.m. Two minutes to midnight The tip had been maddenly vague:Valente's people meet on Thursdays. Black entrance. Midnight. Vague, but enough to drag her across the city on a night when any sane person would be asleep. She shifted her weight, the camera strap biting into her shoulder. Months of chasing this story had taught her patience. It had also taught her how quickly patience could turn to obsession Back when she was a junior reporter at the Tribune, Aria thought the political beat would be her ticket to the big leagues. She’d dug through campaign finances, city contracts, all the usual paper trails. It was during one of those routine dives, tracing a suspicious development grant, that the name Dominic Valente had first surfaced. At first, it was nothing more than whispers in financial records and redacted m

The rain hadn’t stopped by morning. Aria stood at her kitchen sink, watching the gray skyline blur behind streaked glass, the last line of the night’s message replaying in her mind: “Your move”Her laptop glowed on the counter. Every instinct told her to pull the plug, to run a mile from Dominic Valente and the nameless people who could slip through encryption like smoke.Instead she brewed coffee, black and bitter, and began digging.Bank records first. Dock shipments next. Within an hour her screen filled with a lattice of shell companies and flagged transfers, construction firms that never built, charities that never gave. Valente’s empire was a maze of clean fronts and filthy money.A knock broke her focus.“Delivery,” a voice called.Aria’s pulse jumped. She hadn’t ordered anything.She cracked the door. A courier stood in the hall, hood drawn low. “Package for you, Ms. Lane.”“I didn’t…”He pressed a slim black envelope into her hand and turned without waiting for a signature.I

Aria woke to a morning so bright it felt staged, the city stretched beneath a thin winter sun. The night before still clung to her like smoke: the chase through the pier, the cold burn of rain, Dominic’s unreadable eyes. She made coffee twice as strong as usual and tried to convince herself that the flash drive on her desk was just another assignment.But the apartment felt smaller now. Each creak in the floorboard, each distant siren, sounded amplified, as if the world outside were pressing closer. She left the curtains half-drawn, nervous without knowing why.By early afternoon she’d written nothing. Her notes remained blank, her recorder untouched. She sat cross-legged on the couch, laptop open but screen dark, the flash drive a small, accusing weight beside it. She could almost feel the city breathing under her window: traffic in long sighs, a rhythm too deliberate to ignore.A soft knock broke the hush.Her first thought was that it was a neighbor, maybe a package. The second, sh