It was enough.
“That building’s a shell company,” Damian said, staring at the address I’d written down, his voice gone tight with focus. “Registered offshore, three layers deep. If Castellano’s running his bribes through it, it’s the first hard evidence we’ve had that ties the money directly to him instead of intermediaries he can disown.”
“Is it enough to stop the vote?”
“It’s enough to make the board member who’s wavering understand exactly what he’s agreeing to be part of, if he sells his vote.” Damian’s jaw set. “Sometimes people don’t need to be threatened, Nora. They just need to be shown clearly, in a mirror, what they’re becoming.”
The vote itself was almost anticlimactic, in the way that the resolution of true danger so often is — not a gunfight, not a fire, but a quiet, packed room, fluorescent lights, five people at a long table, and a wavering board member named Halloran who, when handed a folder the morning of the vote by a lawyer Damian trusted, went pale, excused himself for ten minutes, and returned to vote against the reclassification with a steadiness that suggested he’d finally found a spine he hadn’t known he still had.
Three to two. Castellano’s foothold, gone. Not with bullets. With paperwork and a folder and a caterer who used to know everybody.
I watched from the back of the gallery, and when the gavel came down, I felt something in my chest loosen that had been wound tight since the library door slammed open five days ago.
Damian found me on the courthouse steps afterward, rain threatening again in a sky the color of wet slate, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all. Then he laughed — actually laughed, low and disbelieving, like a man setting down something impossibly heavy.
“You did that,” he said. “Not my security team. Not my lawyers. You and a network of waiters and valets that no one in Castellano’s organization thought to look at twice.”
“We did that,” I corrected. “It took both halves.”
