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Chapter 142
“The supplier contracts have returned, sir,” Jasmine informed after greeting Alan in his office."Hm? So soon?” He turned around in his swiveling chair and gestured for her to place the hot cup of coffee on the table.She did so and stood back, " Three of the five that Fontaine Group had pulled away from Gold Aries' network over the preceding weeks have made contact through Mr Timothy's office, citing revised terms they wanted to discuss. Mr Tim handled two of them personally and assigned the third to a senior contracts manager, and by the end of the week all three had signed back into the Gold Aries supply chain on terms that were marginally better than their original agreements.”“Is that so?” Alan sighed, reaching for the coffee. He could feel a wave of headache coming in the next few days.…And so, he signed off on the paperwork on a Wednesday morning without making anything of it.The luxury goods division was next. Fontaine Group's new line had launched with reasonable coverage
Chapter 141
If Trident had picked up his presence, the note made sense. They would want to know what he was doing here and whether his objectives aligned with or complicated their own. Mutual interests was the language of someone proposing a room for talk rather than a confrontation, which was at least a reasonable opening.Reluctantly, he went to the location at the time specified.It was a mid-range café in the commercial district, busy enough in the mid-morning that two people talking at a corner table would not be remarkable. He arrived early and took a seat with a view of the door. He ordered coffee and waited.The man who came in eight minutes after the specified time was unremarkable in every external detail. Medium height, middle age, a jacket that had been chosen specifically to not draw attention. He found John without scanning the room, which meant he already knew what he was looking for, and sat down across from him with the ease of someone accustomed to these kinds of meetings."Than
Chapter 140
John Bones made the first contact on a Tuesday evening, through a man named Craw.Craw ran a small security outfit in Silver Lace's southern district, one that provided muscle for clubs and private events and asked no questions about the nature of the events in question. He was not powerful, not well-connected in any serious sense, but he was embedded, and embedded people knew other embedded people, and that was the point.John had been watching Craw's operation for four days before he made contact. He wanted to know the shape of the man before he sat across from him, which was a habit he had never broken regardless of how small the meeting.He walked into the bar where Craw held court on Tuesday evenings at eight-thirty, took a seat two down from him at the counter, ordered a beer, and waited.Craw noticed him by eight-forty-five. It was hard not to notice John Bones in most rooms, besides,.Craw was a man smart enough to notice who stood amongst normal men.He leaned over after a few
Chapter 139
"It's close enough to the same thing that the distinction doesn't do much work," Alan replied sternly.Dane smiled at that, a short, genuine one. "Fair point.""Lucia." Alan dropped her name after a brief moment of silence.Dane set his glass down. "What about her?""You don't have to act so aloof. Hazel found out through other channels." Alan kept his voice even. "I want to understand what you asked her to do.""I asked her what you care about," Dane responded reluctantly. "I wasn't asking her to act against you. I was asking her to help me understand you."Alan narrowed his eyes. "Meaning?""I’m not particularly obliged to answer that question, Mr Walked,” Dane shrugged with a small smirk. He seemed to be enjoying his time ther. "But do not fear, I didn't ask her to do anything else. Whatever she's decided to do separately, that's her own."Alan sat with that for a moment. It tracked with what he understood of Lucia's calls, the solicitor visit, the documents she had told him about
Chapter 138
In a small restaurant in the old district, away from the business centre, Alan was calmly seated at a table. He had eaten there twice before, once with Hazel and once alone, and he liked it because the tables were spaced properly and the staff were very good at their job. Their discretion was very professional and he would argue that they showed more etiquette than in higher-class restaurants.He arrived ten minutes early and took the corner table, the one with a clear view of the entrance and the secondary exit near the kitchen. It was an habit of his. He ordered water and looked at the menu without reading it.Dane arrived at exactly the agreed time. He wasn't a minute late, nor a minute early. The man was right on time, almost irking Alan.‘What is he trying to prove?’ Alan couldn't help but ask himself. No one would go that far just for the sake of it.Dane came alone, as Alan had specified. No Sera, no assistant, no lawyer hovering in a car outside. He wore a jacket without a tie
Chapter 137
The documents had been sitting in the bottom of Lucia's wardrobe for six weeks, inside a manila envelope, underneath a stack of sweaters she hadn't worn since winter.She had put them there the day she came back from the solicitor, tucked them under the sweaters, and told herself she was waiting until she knew what she wanted to do with them. Six weeks later, she still hadn't moved them, which she had started to understand was itself the decision to keep not deciding, which worked right up until it stopped working.It stopped working on a Thursday morning.Michael had left early for a meeting with someone from the Donovan family's legal circle, which he had mentioned the night before in the offhand way he mentioned most things these days, a brief summary that didn't invite questions. She had nodded and gone back to Peace, who was at the stage where she demanded constant attention and rewarded it with the kind of complete, uncomplicated joy that made everything else feel smaller by com
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