Page 110 of Wells

I set the laptop on his desk and turn it toward him. The accounts are up, the trust, the wire chain, the offshore layers stripped back to the name at the bottom.

"What the fuck am I looking at?"

"Vin killed Dad."

Ridge goes still. His eyes drop to the screen. I watch him read it twice.

"What are you talking about, Wells?"

"It's all there. I've spent weeks pulling every thread I let slide last year. I started with the money. It was always the part that never added up. And then I met one of the guards who was standing outside the warehouse that night."

Ridge rubs his beard like he does when he's thinking. He stands up and puts his hands on either side of the laptop.

"You met with one of the men standing guard that night?"

"I did."

"Walk me through it."

So I do, in the flattest voice I own, because flat is the only way I can get the words out in order.

"He's been skimming for years. Small amounts of product tucked into other companies' containers, a hundred kilos here, two hundred there, never enough to flag on a load that size. He never shipped a thing of his own. He had the access and the contacts, so he took a little off the top of other people's freight and let it run. Over and over. For probably twenty years or more. I can verify ten, because that's how far I went back."

"Jesus."

"He never told Dad, because he knew what Dad would say. No product, ever, on a Stone load. That was the one line nobody crossed. So Vin didn't ask. He didn't need permission to run it quietly off to the side, and that's exactly what he did."

"How?"

"He's got no wife, no life outside this building, just the work and the money stacking up somewhere none of us ever thought to look."

Ridge's hand finds the edge of the desk.

"The antiques aren't a hobby. They're where he washes it. Every dollar comes out the far end looking like a quiet man who buys old furniture."

I scroll to the freight. "Then he got greedy. He put ten million of his own into sourcing one shipment. Fentanyl, a hundred million on the street. That's on top of the ten he wired the hitter the day after Dad died. Twenty million of his own money on the table before a single kilo cleared customs. But you can't tuck that much into somebody else's cargo and hope nobody weighs it. He needed a company to walk it through the front door.”

"Duvall," Ridge says.

"He rented him. A faceless offer, five million to be the name on the paperwork and initiate the shipment. Duvall never touched the product, never asked a question. Vin orchestrates the arrival, Duvall collects for doing nothing, and sending a shipment of electronics through our ports."

I make myself hold his eyes as he processes the gravity of what I just told him.

"Duvall wasn't the man, Ridge. He was paper. Dad started tightening access and asking the wrong questions, which put the whole shipment at risk, so Vin took him out before he could say the name out loud. And here's the part that should gut you. It didn't even work. You flagged that container on weight three weeks after the funeral and pushed it to Homeland Security yourself. It got seized at the dock. Vin murdered the man who raised him, twenty million of his own gone, the hundred-million payoff gone, all of it, for a load that never cleared customs."

"Then he sat in every meeting we ran and helped us build the case against the patsy he'd already picked out," Ridge finishes.

"Exactly."

Ridge doesn't say anything for a long moment. I watch it arrive on him, the same place it arrived on me an hour ago, the floor going out from under a thing he was sure of.

"We put two men in the ground for this." His voice drops low. "I put them there."

"They took dirty money. They weren't innocent." It's the only mercy I have, and it isn't much. "But they didn't kill Dad. Vin did, and he let them die for it while he stood next to us with his hand on our shoulders."

Ridge's knuckles go white.

"I executed them."