The city was empty at 3AM. Rohen drove fast through amber lights, Lucien’s warning still turning in his head: someone in that family knows the truth.Avalon’s headquarters occupied the top three floors of a glass tower in the financial district. Rohen had only been inside it twice. Tonight every light on the executive floor was burning.Lucien met him at the elevator, his silver hair slightly disheveled. Through the boardroom’s glass wall, lawyers sat around the long table with laptops open and papers spread. Three people Rohen didn’t recognize stood near the windows speaking in low voices.“They’ve been here since midnight,” Lucien said. “I pulled everyone I trust.”“That’s a shorter list than it was yesterday,” Rohen said.Lucien said nothing. Which was answer enough.-----The legal filings covered the boardroom table. Shell companies nested inside shell companies, each layer designed to frustrate any attempt to trace it back to a name. But the patterns were there.Rohen wasn’t a l

Rohen arrived at Avalon Grand Tower before sunrise.The building still belonged to the quiet hour between night and morning, when even the cleaning staff had finished their rounds and the corridors held only the low hum of ventilation systems and distant elevator motors. The city outside the glass walls was just beginning to pale, the horizon turning from black to a thin line of silver.He preferred this hour.No interruptions. No witnesses.The private elevator opened directly into his office. Rohen stepped inside, removed his jacket, and set it over the back of the chair before activating the wall of monitors embedded into the far side of the room.A grid of data came alive across the screens.Communications logs. Transaction flows. Encrypted message routing. Avalon Holdings had dozens of subsidiaries, shell acquisitions, and intermediary firms moving quietly through the global financial system. The takeover attempt he had begun months earlier depended on that complexity remaining i