Lahat ng Kabanata ng Once Bitten, Twice Shy: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

"We stop being careful," I said. "Starting tonight."Four of us sat around Milo's conference table well past midnight, the office dark except for the lamp in the corner and the glow of a laptop screen still open to Naomi's recording. Milo, Naomi, Nathaniel, and me, the closest thing I had to allies in a fight that had taken almost everything from me before I understood I was even in it."Gideon knows someone close to him is working against him," Milo said. "Maybe not your name outright. But he knows there's a leak, and he's smart enough to start closing every door that might be feeding you information.""Which means our current approach is done," Nathaniel said. "Slow, quiet, one document at a time, that worked when he thought he had time to spare. He no longer believes that. If we keep moving at this pace, he'll shut down every source before we finish building the case.""So what do we do instead?" I asked.Nathaniel leaned forward, his eyes steady on mine. "We stop reacting to him a

Three days after the failed transfer, Gideon started moving money again.I found out from Nathaniel, not from a word Gideon said to me himself. He still believed I'd surrendered, still believed the rejected transfer had been nothing more than a strange legal glitch he'd work around in time. He kissed me goodbye every morning, told me about his day over dinner, and spent his nights in the study making calls he thought I couldn't trace."He's grown careless," Nathaniel told me over the phone, his voice carrying the particular satisfaction of a man watching a plan bear fruit at last. "Three transfers in the last two days, all smaller than the one that got flagged, all moving through accounts connected to Ridgeline. He thinks he's found a way around the protection clause.""Has he?""No. Every transaction, no matter how small, gets captured the moment it touches an account tied to your father's beneficiary structure. He's not slipping past the archive. He's feeding it."I sat with that fo

"Move," Milo breathed, already pulling me back from the hedge by my sleeve. "Now. Slow, low, don't run until we're past the tree line."We moved together, crouched low across the wet grass, every step feeling louder than it should have in the silence pressing down around us. My heart hammered so hard I could feel it in my throat, certain any second Harold's voice would call out behind us, certain the beam of a flashlight would find our backs before we reached the fence.It didn't happen.We slipped through the gap Milo had led us through an hour earlier, out onto the dark side street where Nathaniel's car sat waiting, and didn't speak a single word until all three of us were inside with the doors locked and the engine running."Drive," I said, my voice shaking. "Just drive."Nathaniel pulled away from the curb without headlights until we'd put two full blocks between us and the cemetery, and not until then did any of us let out the breath we'd been holding since Harold's voice cut thr

"His name is Walter Briggs now," Milo said, sliding a printed address across the table toward me. "Charles Renner changed his identity through the courts four years ago, moved twice since, settled outside a small town where nobody asks questions about a quiet man who keeps to himself.""How did you find him?""Property tax records. He owns the house under Briggs, but the mortgage company still lists an old emergency contact from his life as Renner, a sister who never updated her paperwork. It took some digging, but few people manage to erase every trace of themselves. There's always a thread left somewhere."We drove out that same afternoon, the three of us, Milo behind the wheel, Nathaniel beside him, me in the back seat with my father's letter tucked into my bag like a talisman I couldn't leave behind.The house sat at the end of a gravel road, modest, well kept, the kind of place a man builds when he wants a life no one would ever think to look twice at.We parked a house down and

"Why you married her."I said the words out loud in the car, four hours after we left Renner's house, my father's voice still echoing in my head like a bell no one could stop."He said it to Gideon," I said. "Not to Harold. Not to Renner. To Gideon, at the door. My father knew about the marriage before it happened, and he knew the reason."Nathaniel kept his eyes on the road, both hands steady on the wheel. "That means there may be proof of it. Your father wouldn't have said those words without proof behind them.""Then we find it."We didn't go home. We drove straight to Milo's office and spread the last of Nathaniel's old files across the conference table, every folder and drive and printed page we hadn't yet read line by line. Milo made coffee no one drank. Naomi joined by phone from her safe house, her voice tight with the same exhaustion I could see in everyone's faces.For two hours, we read in silence."Here," Nathaniel said at last.I looked up. He was staring at his laptop sc