Now, the Broken Halos turn their violent attention to the silver USB drive resting on the coffee table.
Daniel picks it up. He examines the drive’s outer casing with a small, clinical flashlight. He turns it once in his fingers, checking the port connector.
“Custom encryption shell,” he observes. “Costa family vendor. We have seen this spec before. Give me twenty minutes.”
He does not need twenty.
Sixteen minutes later, the encryption shatters.
Daniel’s exhale is long and low. He leans back from the screen and says nothing for a full three seconds. He just stares at the raw data cascading down his monitor.
“Nick.” Daniel’s voice is quiet. The specific quiet of a man choosing words carefully. “You need to see this.”
Nick crosses the room in four strides. He leans over Daniel’s shoulder. He reads the screen.
The lines of his jaw tighten one by one—a slow progression of controlled fury, like a fist closing around something breakable.
“Pull it up on the main display,” Nick says.
Daniel connects to the large portable monitor Kaila already set up against the far wall. The raw data expands across the screen—columns of offshore accounts, shell companies, port manifests, strings of coded payments linked by dates and amounts.
Mia takes over.
The club auditor pulls her chair directly in front of the monitor. She produces a slim, leather-bound notebook from her jacket. She uncaps a precise, black pen. Her eyes begin moving across the columns at a speed that makes my head swim.
I stand at the edge of the group and watch her work. She does not narrate. She does not exclaim. She simply reads and writes in small, exacting script, her pen moving in a continuous loop between the notebook and the screen.
After four minutes, she stops.
She taps the pen twice against the notebook. She circles a cluster of numbers on the top page.
“Dominic is bleeding himself.” Her voice is flat and clinical. “These outflows started fourteen months ago. Look at the volume.”
She points to a column on the screen. The numbers are staggering. Not cartel operating expenses. Not bribes. Not the usual cost of running a criminal empire.
“He is liquidating profitable assets,” Mia continues. “Port shares. Distribution contracts. Legitimate business holdings. He is converting them to cash and funneling the cash into land acquisition.”
“What land?” Nick asks.
Mia circles another cluster on her notebook page. She draws a single arrow connecting the two groups of numbers.
“The Pine Valley Ridge.” She states it without drama. “Every dollar traces back to the same parcel codes. The same mountain range.”
The silence in the room changes.
It is not the stunned silence of the USB reveal. It is slower, heavier—the silence of people recalibrating their understanding of a war they thought they knew.
Nick straightens. He stares at the circled numbers on Mia’s notebook page.
“He is bankrupting his own cartel,” Nick says, “to buy our territory.”
“Not just to buy it,” Mia corrects. She flips to the next page of her notebook. “He is targeting parcels along the eastern ridge line. He is not building. He is not developing. He is acquiring and holding. He has been doing it for over a year.”
Rafe pushes off the wall where he has been standing. He crosses the room with slow, deliberate steps. He stares at the screen.
“There is something in that mountain range,” Rafe says. “Something worth burning his own empire for.”
“He has been squeezing us out of Pine Valley for two years,” Nick says. “Buying off our judges. Cutting our supply lines. We assumed it was standard cartel expansion.”