Page 92 of Innocent Until Proven Witch

Iris appears through the rain moments later, completely soaked, hair plastered across her face, and her arms stacked improbably high with documents wrapped against her chest which suggests she has been protecting them from the water with her own body.

I look at the stack for a full second.

"Please tell me you didn't run through a hurricane carrying paperwork."

"I genuinely hate you," Iris replies, and shoves the top folder toward me without ceremony.

"What is this?" I ask, already opening it, already scanning.

"Proof," she says simply, and the word lands with enough weight that every trace of humor exits the conversation immediately.

Gideon steps closer.

Iris opens the folder wide despite the rain splashing across the pages, because none of us can afford to care about that right now.

The records inside are meticulous — shipping manifests, cargo logs, contract transfers, dates running back further than any of us expected. The dead merchants. The missing shipments. The vanished vessels. Every thread running to the same place, every loss resolving into the same name.

Iris presses a finger to a column of figures and looks up at me.

"Every cargo loss, every missing vessel, every route that went dark — all of it connects back to Aldric. He didn't simply profit from the disruptions."

Her voice is steady and cold and entirely without satisfaction.

"He engineered them."

Gideon exhales through his teeth, the fury in his expression the kind that has been building quietly for a long time and has finally found something solid to rest against.

"He stole everything."

"Only enough to build an empire," Iris replies, and the bitterness in it is one of who has spent weeks suspecting the truth and finds no comfort at all in being right.

The statement hangs in the rain between us.

Because it is not simply corruption the records are showing — it is motive, intent, decades of it stacked methodically on top of itself.

My father's route appears on one page. The fishermen on another. Independent traders, exporters, small merchants who had built something from nothing and then disappeared from the records entirely, their goods resurfacing under different names in different ports while Aldric's reach extended further with every transaction.

Every road in the documents leads back to the same man. Every single one.

Gideon lifts his gaze toward the harbor, toward the destruction still unfolding around us, and when he speaks his voice carries the weight of someone who already knows the answer but needs to hear it aloud.

"What now?"

I close the folder.

The answer arrives without hesitation, clear and absolute and long overdue.

"We expose him."

Iris exhales — the slow, quiet release of who has been waiting for another person to say that out loud.

Gideon nods once, his jaw set.

Lightning flashes overhead and the harbor goes white for a single, frozen moment before the darkness rushes back in.

The storm continues raging around us, but something has shifted beneath it, something that feels less like chaos and more like the moment just before a thing that has been coming for a while finally arrives.

We have the evidence, the witness and the truth. And this time, Aldric will have to answer for all of it.