Page 152 of Maksym

Lucia spread the records with swift precision. Bank transfers. Property holdings. Corporate registrations. Escrow statements. Asset purchases. A familiar sickness moved through me, not because of the content itself, but because of the form. Evil loved paperwork. Evil hid in numbered accounts, limited liability companies, procurement contracts, leases signed by men who would never personally open the doors they paid for.

Doc turned his tablet so I could see the screen.

“Wrecker pulled transfer logs out of three servers and one private ledger,” he said. “Don’t ask me how. He explained it twice, and I understood enough to know the man scares the hell out of computers.”

Despite myself, my mouth moved. “I like him already.”

Doc’s grin was brief. “He’d like you too. And his mate is better than he is.”

Lucia tapped one column with a manicured nail. “These are Phoenix-area real estate acquisitions tied to trusts that were layered through hospitality groups. Most human-facing records stop here.” She moved to the next page. “Wrecker did not stop here.”

“Good for Wrecker,” I said.

Maddie leaned forward slightly from across the aisle. “He’s really good at diggin’ where folks don’t want him.”

Remy’s smile was slow. “My favorite kind of man, professionally speaking.”

Bohdan lifted a hand. “I am wounded.”

“You are a different category of useful,” Remy said.

“I am uncertain whether to feel complimented.”

“You will survive the ambiguity.”

Under other circumstances, I might have laughed. Under these, the humor brushed the surface and sank.

I pulled the closest record toward me.

The names were different. The structure was not. Layered entities. Related-party loans. Management companies that existed on paper only. Shells owning shells owning shells, until the person at the center could stand in a room full of victims and claim he had no idea what happened inside properties he technically did not possess.

I had prosecuted men who thought complexity was innocence.

They were usually disappointed.

“These are sloppy,” I said.

Lucia’s eyes lifted. “Sloppy?”

“Not at the first level. At the first level, they look expensive. But deeper down, there’s repetition. Same registered agents. Same transfer timing. Same amounts broken just below reporting thresholds.” I tapped the paper. “That’s arrogance. Not sophistication.”

Maksym’s voice came low beside me. “Lucian has always been arrogant.”

“Yes,” I said. “But arrogance leaves fingerprints because it assumes no one cares to look closely.”

The cabin went quiet around that.

I did not look at Maksym. I could feel what the sentence had done to him. Not guilt, exactly. Something colder. Lucian had operated inside territories, councils, old vampire privilege, and all the while men and women had disappeared into houses with clean deeds and dirty rooms.

Lucia opened the laptop on the table.

The screen woke to a frozen image from what appeared to be a security feed. Grainy. Night. A loading bay behind a low building. Timestamp in the corner. A van backed toward a door.

My fingers went still on the paper.

Doc’s expression changed before Lucia pressed play. The humor vanished from him entirely, leaving only a man who knew how to stand near suffering without pretending it was smaller than it was.

“Grace,” Lucia said, and the use of my name rather than my title made me look at her. “You do not have to watch.”