Page 30 of Make Them Pay

I’m inside by 2:47.

Margaux’s account opens on the screen like a window into a life that has nothing to do with mine. Tuition payments to an expensive university. Money for housing, food, books. A small savings account she seems to manage herself. She’s careful with money. She doesn’t overspend. She saves steadily. She makes deliberate choices. This is someone who takes her independence seriously, which makes what I’m about to do feel like swallowing glass.

I follow the extra money. The small differences between what should be there for school and what actually moves through the account. Forty-three dollars here. A hundred and twelve there. Never enough for anyone to notice if they aren’t looking hard.

But it adds up. Over eighteen months, nearly forty thousand dollars has been quietly redirected. All of it goes to an account in Luxembourg under a name called Nightwood Capital.

I check every place I can. Nothing public turns up. No real company. No officers. No address. Just a ghost name that exists only on paper in a place that protects privacy.

The account number matches patterns I’ve already seen in Goldenbell’s main system. Nightwood Capital isn’t separate. It’s another layer of the same operation. The money from Margaux’s trust joins other funds and moves somewhere else. One more step to follow.

The clock reads 3:15. Forty-five minutes until my access resets.

I need to reach the Luxembourg account. The bank there is bigger and tighter. Time is running out.

I work quickly. The connection between Nightwood Capital and Goldenbell means there’s got to be a regular transfer moving money between them. If I can catch the next one, I can ride along the same way I slipped into the first bank.

The next transfer is set for 3:22. Seven minutes.

I set up the intercept in six.

At 3:22 the transfer starts. Twelve thousand dollars moving from a Goldenbell account to Nightwood Capital. I attach my request to it, keeping it small and ordinary-looking. The Luxembourg bank accepts the transfer and my request slips through with it.

I’m in.

Nightwood Capital is the end of the line. Every outgoing transfer from this account goes to one place: a personal investment account belonging to Serafina Delacroix herself. Not a company. Not a subsidiary. Her. All the money that flows through Goldenbell, through the trusts and the shells and a nineteen-year-old’s college fund, ends up here in her private portfolio.

And the portfolio is huge. Four-hundred and seventy-two million dollars. Real estate in three countries. Art. Precious metals. A personal fortune built on everything Goldenbell has taken from people over the years.

I map it all. Every account. Every investment. Every path the money takes. The complete picture of Serafina’s empire, from the public face to the private fortune.

At 3:38 I finish. One hundred percent complete. Every connection recorded.

At 3:42 I refresh my access with eighteen minutes to spare.

I sit back. My hands are shaking. Not the old panic tremor. Pure adrenaline from running at full speed for hours with no one to catch a mistake.

The map glows on the screen. Thirty-seven pages of everything we need. Enough to take Goldenbell apart from the ground up. Enough to freeze every asset Serafina owns. Enough to put her away for a long time.

There's one thing left to do before I package it.

Render taught me this on the second day at the cabin, sitting so close our elbows kept touching. Before you hand anything to anyone, you read it as your enemy. You look for what it gives away. Not what it proves. What it costs.

So I run the integrity pass. I pull Goldenbell's archived security logs into the package and start reading them the way a federal forensic accountant would read them, from the outside, with no loyalty to anyone in the file.

And there I am.

Months of me. Every probe I ever ran from the desk in my apartment with the window that doesn't close all the way. Every session, timestamped. The clumsy early attempts that bounced off the outer shell in my first weeks, when I didn't know what I was doing and left noise everywhere I touched. Then the good ones, the clean ones, the nights I got in and out and thought I'd been a ghost. My method signature is all over them. The specific way I sequence a probe, the intervals I favor, the small stubborn habits that are as distinctive as handwriting because nobody taught me any of it and I built every one of them myself.

This is what Serafina found. This is the thread she pulled that led to Poe's network, and from Poe to the crew, and from the crew to a cell with a drain in the floor.

And it's sitting in the middle of my evidence package, in a file that goes out to six federal recipients the second Render steps into that stairwell.

I understand the shape of it immediately. That's the worst part. There's no slow dawning, no minutes of confusion. I look at the logs and I see exactly what a prosecutor sees: eighteen months of unauthorized intrusion into a private financial network, from a single identifiable origin, by a person whose name is going to be in the same package under contributor. It doesn't matter that Serafina is worse. It doesn't matter that I was right about her. Nobody in a federal building is going to weigh my intentions against my timestamps.

Poe kept his mouth shut in that room for two weeks to keep this exact file from surfacing. He let Ross open the cut on his hairline over and over rather than unlock a network that had my fingerprints inside it. If I send this package as it stands, I hand them the thing my brother has been bleeding to protect, and I do it myself, from a chair, in four seconds.

Or I scrub it.