جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 130

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN Vanessa sent a folder two days later, delivered by a courier to the office instead of the house, per Dom's insistence that nothing connected to this touch their home directly. "She's thorough," Dom admitted, flipping through the pages spread across his desk that evening, Cassie beside him with her own stack, Dom still in his work clothes hours after everyone else had gone home for the night, the office quiet except for the hum of the ventilation system. "I'll give her that much credit, at least.""She had a lot of time to pay attention," Cassie said, sliding another page toward the growing pile between them. "Sitting in rooms he thought she was too pretty to actually listen in on. His mistake, apparently, and now ours to benefit from.""Marcus always makes mistakes," Dom agreed, not looking up from the ledger in front of him.They worked in mostly comfortable silence for a while, cross-referencing dates against public records, Dom occasionally readi

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN"I need you both on this call," Whitefield said immediately he picked up. "Something happened at Hale Industries yesterday that you need to know about, and it connects directly to what we've been investigating."Dom put him on speaker, setting the phone on the kitchen table between them, both of them going still.“Speak.”"Apparently, Marcus tried to walk into a board meeting yesterday morning," Whitfield said. "The security stopped him as regards to the suspension, and things escalated. He had to be physically removed from the building.”“How bad?” Cassie asked with a frown on her face. “Very bad actually. And I am quite certain because the compliance monitoring firm we retained as part of the settlement flagged it, they track his movements around any Hale-affiliated property as a condition of the agreement."“If he's trespassing how do we know he has even changed? We should have just locked him up.”“No… we shouldn't have. We did the right thing, Do

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY TWOPreston Locke looked smaller in person than the grainy stairwell photo had suggested, a young man in a slightly too-large suit sitting beside a lawyer who kept one hand flat on the table, like he was physically prepared to stop his client from saying more than they'd negotiated the night before."My client is prepared to cooperate fully," the lawyer said, opening the meeting with the careful, rehearsed cadence of someone who'd spent hours the previous evening drilling exactly these words into his client's head. "In exchange for reduced charges and a recommendation of no jail time, given his age, his lack of any prior record, and his willingness to provide substantive information beyond what he's already offered."Whitfield sat across the conference table with Dom and Cassie flanking him on either side, his expression giving away nothing, the same careful neutrality he wore into every negotiation Cassie had watched him conduct over these past months.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FOUR"I need to be clear about the limits of what we actually have," Whitfield said carefully, watching her face. "This is one wire transfer. It's not proof of everything Locke's intermediary has been doing recently or confirmation that your father is the actual voice on that burner phone. But it is solid proof that he had both clear motive and clear means to help bury evidence of the original conspiracy and that raises serious, unavoidable questions about what he might still be actively protecting even now."Dom's hand found Cassie's, gripping tight enough that she could feel his pulse through his palm. "Cassie.""I'm fine," she said automatically, though her voice betrayed her completely, thin and unsteady in a way she couldn't quite mask."You don't have to be fine right now," Dom said gently, his thumb moving slowly against her knuckles.She sat still for a while, feeling the old, practiced instinct to push through it silently and hold herself togeth

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVEThe boutique smelled like lavender as Cassie stood on the small raised platform in front of the three-way mirror feeling, for one full hour, like she had no other care in this world."Turn," Margaret said, waving a small circle with her hand, and Cassie obliged, the finished skirt of the dress swishing softly around her ankles, every alteration now perfectly in place, the fabric falling exactly the way she'd pictured it in her head the very first time she'd tried it on."Oh," Eleanor said quietly, pressing a hand to her chest, tears already gathering in the corners of her eyes despite her obvious effort to hold them back. "Oh, Cassie, look at you. Just look at you standing there.""It's finished," Cassie said, running her palm slowly over the fitted bodice, feeling the weight of the beading beneath her fingers, real now instead of just pinned and imagined. "And it's so gorgeous.”"Dom is going to fall in love all over the second he sees you in this,