Todos los capítulos de Reborn & Became The Alpha's Obsession: Capítulo 41 - Capítulo 50

꧁ ASHER'S POVGrace had covered the study's long table in printouts by the time I arrived, financial records spread out like a map with too many roads leading nowhere useful. She looked up when I came in, exhaustion sitting plain on her face despite the sharp focus she still managed to bring to every line of numbers in front of her."Ashcombe's money trail," she said, tapping a page. "Three separate transfers before it lands anywhere identifiable. I traced two of them back to shell accounts that dissolve the moment you try to follow them further.""Sloppy work, or deliberate?""That's the strange part." She frowned at the page like it had personally offended her. "It looks sloppy. Amateur, almost, the kind of cover-up someone throws together in a hurry. Except everything else about this operation has been careful. Methodical. Whoever's behind this doesn't strike me as the type to suddenly get careless with the money.""So the sloppiness is the tell.""That's my read." Grace sat back,

꧁ JAXON'S POVThe ledgers had a particular smell, old paper and dust settled into leather bindings nobody had opened in years, and I'd been buried in them long enough that the study's afternoon light had shifted from gold to gray without my noticing.Thomas had handed me three years of business records the day after I arrived, framing it as exactly the kind of useful work he'd summoned me home to do. Mostly it was tedious — transfers, licensing renewals, the ordinary architecture of a family business that had run itself competently enough without my direct involvement for years. I'd expected nothing more than an afternoon of numbers.I found the discrepancy almost by accident, flipping past a page I'd nearly skimmed over entirely. A transfer of documents, dated eight months before William's death, routed to an outside firm I didn't recognize. The family had used the same legal counsel for decades, a firm two towns over that handled everything from property disputes to routine contract

꧁ ASHER'S POVI called Marcus to my study rather than the council chamber, no witnesses, no formal record of the meeting at all, and watched him register the shift in venue the moment he stepped through the door."No agenda for this one?" He settled into the chair across from my desk, unbothered on the surface, though something in the careful way he arranged himself told me he'd already guessed this wasn't going to be routine business."There's an agenda." I didn't sit. I stayed standing, deliberately, the same posture I used whenever I wanted a conversation to feel less like negotiation and more like consequence. "I know about the money trail, Marcus. Denny Ashcombe's payments, routed through three separate accounts before they land somewhere untraceable. I know they connect back to Whitfield and Cross. I know that firm also handled a retainer traced to your household years back."Something flickered behind his eyes, quick and controlled, and I watched him decide, in real time, which

꧁ LYRA'S POVAsher had cleared the evening without telling me until I found him already waiting on the terrace, two plates of something simple laid out on the small table between the chairs we'd claimed as ours over the past weeks. No agenda sheet this time. No itinerary. Just him, sleeves rolled, watching the last light fade gold over the hills."No Marcus tonight," he said, before I could even ask. "No Aurelia. No conspiracy. I want one evening where we talk about something that isn't trying to destroy us."Something in my chest eased at that, warm and grateful, and I sat across from him, the autumn air carrying the particular chill that made the food's warmth feel like its own small comfort."What did you have in mind instead?""The future." He said it plainly, though something almost nervous flickered behind the directness, unusual for a man who rarely hesitated over anything. "Not next week's future. Further out. What Luna leadership actually looks like for you, once all of this

꧁ LYRA'S POVTwo threads, one firm, and still nothing solid enough to act on. I sat with that frustration for a long moment, staring at the same stack of notes I'd been rearranging for days, Grace's financial diagrams tangled beside Jaxon's ledger discrepancy, Rowan Whitfield's name sitting unresolved at the center of all of it.I was good at patience. I'd built this entire investigation on patience, refusing to let old instinct rush me into conclusions the evidence didn't yet support. But patience without the right tools just meant staring at the same fragments longer, and I understood, sitting there in the records room, that I'd reached the edge of what Grace and I could uncover alone."I need someone who actually knows how to read this properly," I told Grace that afternoon, gesturing at the tangled diagrams spread across the table. "Someone trained for exactly this kind of thing. We're good, but we're improvising. I want an expert."Grace considered that a moment, something calcul