THE KING’S VESTIGE

Chapter 8

Kade didn't attack the Thorne empire. He dissected it.

Three days after Celessa's phone call, he stood in a warehouse on the edge of the Slag Districts and watched his team unload crates of documents they had stolen from a Thorne shipping facility.

"Is this everything?" he asked the woman in charge.

She nodded and pulled out a tablet. "Shipping manifests going back five years. Customer lists. Payment records. Everything they thought was safely locked away in their private servers." She swiped through screens. "The encryption was military-grade, but we had military-grade tools, so it all evened out."

Kade picked up one of the manifests and scanned through the entries. Container shipments were listed as electronics, textiles, and machine parts, but the weights were wrong and the destinations didn't match. He had seen enough smuggling operations during the war to know exactly what he was looking at.

"How many of these are fake?" he said.

"About sixty percent. The rest are legitimate business to keep up appearances." She highlighted several entries on her tablet. "The fake shipments all go through the same three ports. They're all processed by customs agents who coincidentally all have unexplained deposits in their bank accounts every month."

"Send this to the federal trade commission. Anonymous tip. Include enough evidence that they have to investigate, but not so much that they know we have access to the entire database."

"What about the customer lists?"

Kade thought about that for a moment. "Cross-reference them with known criminal organizations and offshore accounts. Anyone who shows up on both lists gets a personal visit from law enforcement. Make it look like routine audits."

She smiled. "You're bleeding them slowly."

"Slow is better than fast. Fast gets noticed. Slow just looks like bad luck." He set down the manifest. 

Kade spent the next six hours going through documents and setting operations in motion. By the time he left the warehouse, the sun was coming up. He had twelve different threads pulling at the Thorne empire from twelve different directions.

None of them were fatal on their own, but together they would start creating problems that even Celessa's money couldn't solve.

He went back to his hotel, took a shower, and changed clothes before checking his encrypted messages.

Marcus had moved Lyric to the backup location without incident. Aunt Mira was stable and recovering. A federal investigation into Thorne Logistics had been opened. Three different news organizations were preparing stories about the employee files.

Everything was moving exactly the way he had planned.

Then he got a message from an unknown number: You're making waves. I like it. Want to talk?

Kade stared at the message and tried to figure out if this was Celessa playing games or someone else who had noticed what he was doing.

He typed back: Who is this?

The response came immediately: Someone who wants the same thing you do. Meet me at the Harbor Club tonight. Nine PM. Come alone.

The Harbor Club was one of those exclusive places where rich people went to pretend they were normal. Kade had never been inside. You needed either money or connections to get through the door.

He showed up at eight forty-five wearing another stolen suit and carrying identification that said he was a foreign investor looking to expand his business interests in City B.

The doorman barely glanced at the ID before waving him inside.

The club was all dark wood, soft lighting, and quiet conversations. Kade walked through the main room pretending to look casual while actually scanning every face and every exit.

A woman sat alone at the bar. When he got closer, he realized she was young and beautiful, dressed in a way that suggested she had money to burn.

She turned and looked right at him, smiling. "You must be Kade."

Kade sat down next to her. "And you are?"

"Silisa Thorne." She held out her hand. "Celessa's daughter."

He didn't take her hand. She didn't seem offended and just pulled it back before signaling the bartender for another drink.

"You're wondering why I asked you here," she said as she took a sip of whatever was in her glass. "Wondering if this is a trap. If I'm working with my mother. If you should just walk out right now."

"All of the above."

She laughed, and it sounded genuine. "Smart. I like that. But no, this isn't a trap. No, I'm not working with my mother. Yes, you should probably walk out, but I'm hoping you won't." She turned on her stool so she was facing him fully. "I know what you're doing. The shipping manifests. The employee files. The federal investigations. You're dismantling her empire piece by piece."

"And you want me to stop."

"God, no." She leaned closer, and her eyes were bright with something that looked like excitement. "I want you to keep going. I want you to tear the whole thing down. I want to help."

Kade studied her face, trying to figure out if she was serious. "Why would you help me destroy your own family?"

"Because they're not my family." Her smile disappeared. "Celessa is my biological mother, but she's never been a parent. I'm just another asset to her, another piece on her chessboard. She's been grooming me since I was twelve to take over the business. I've spent my entire life pretending to be the perfect daughter while secretly hating every second of it." She finished her drink. "Then you showed up and started causing problems. I thought maybe finally someone is brave enough or crazy enough to actually fight back."

"What do you want in return?"

"Freedom," she said simply. "Help me get out from under her control, and I'll give you everything you need to take her down. Names, locations, passwords, access codes. I know where all the bodies are buried because I helped bury half of them."

Kade didn't trust her. He couldn't trust her. She was Celessa's daughter. This could all be an elaborate setup designed to make him lower his guard.

But she was also offering him exactly what he needed.

Kade sat there thinking about everything she had said and everything he knew about the Thorne family. Nothing about this situation made sense.

But war had taught him that sometimes the best opportunities came from the most unlikely places.

"Tell me everything," he said.