Chapter 75

PERRY'S POV

I had been pacing for the better part of an hour, back and forth between the window and the minibar, stopping at neither for long enough to do anything useful.

I could not go home, not when I had nothing to return to. I had been waiting for days to get feedback or anything.

My phone buzzed on the table.

Dante.

I picked it up before the second vibration. "Talk to me."

"I have something," Dante said. His voice was the same as always. "Not everything you asked for. Not even close to everything but something."

I sat down on the edge of the bed. "How much is something worth to me right now?"

"Depends on what you plan to do with it."

"Dante." My voice came out sharp and I did not soften it. "I did not call you to have a philosophical conversation. What did you find?"

I could hear him breathing on the other end slowly. "Moretti is clean on the surface," he said finally. "Cleaner than anyone I have looked into in twenty years of doing this. His finances are structured in a way that takes months to unpick properly and even then you are mostly looking at shells inside shells. His people are loyal in a way that money alone does not buy. Whatever he has on them or whatever he has given them, they do not talk."

"I did not ask you for a character reference," I said. "I asked you what you found."

"I am getting there." Another pause. "There is a woman."

I went still. "What woman?"

"Her name is Ulla Adel," Dante said. "German and in her mid thirties. She was involved with Moretti about four years ago. Not casually involved but seriously involved, from what I can piece together. It lasted about a year and then it ended and from everything I can find it did not end well for her."

"What does that mean, did not end well?"

"It means she left Rome with less than she came with," Dante said. "Not just money, I mean she left different. The people who knew her before and after describe her as two separate people. Whatever happened between her and Moretti in that year, it changed something in her that did not change back."

"Where is she now?"

"Berlin. She has been there since she left Rome. She works, keeps to herself, does not talk about her time here to anyone who knows her now." A brief pause. "But she will talk to the right person asking the right questions. I have made quiet contact and she is willing."

I stopped walking. "Is she willing?" I repeated.

"She has been waiting for someone to ask," Dante said. "That is the impression I got. She is not afraid of him anymore or if she is she has decided she does not care."

I ran a hand over my face and looked at the ceiling for a moment. A woman who had been close to Silas Moretti. A woman who had reason to want him damaged and a woman who was willing to talk.

This was the first real thing I had found since the boardroom.

"I need to meet her," I said.

"I can arrange that," Dante replied. "But Perry..." His voice shifted slightly.  "Be careful with this one as she is not just a disgruntled ex. Whatever she knows, she has been sitting on it for four years. That means it is significant enough to hold and dangerous enough to be careful with."

"I can handle it," I replied.

"I am sure you can," Dante said, in the tone of a man who was not entirely sure. "I will send you her contact details. She is expecting to hear from someone. I did not give her your name."

"Good. Keep it that way until I decide how I want to approach this."

"Understood." A pause. "Perry… There is one more thing."

"What?"

"The share acquisition," Dante said. "I had someone look at the paperwork briefly, just a surface look, not a full analysis and it is tight. Moretti's legal team knew what they were doing and they did it carefully. But tight is not the same as perfect and perfect is very rare."

Something shifted in my chest. Small but real. "Are you telling me there might be a crack in it?"

"I am telling you that everything has a crack if you have the right people looking for it," Dante said. "Your problem is that the people you have been using are not the right people. You need specialists. Corporate acquisition lawyers who do nothing else. The kind who have seen transactions like this before and know where the bodies are usually buried."

"Give me names," I said.

"I will send them with Ulla’s flight details," Dante said. "These are not cheap people, Perry."

"I did not ask about the price," I said. "Send them tonight."

"Tonight," he confirmed and the line went dead.

I stood in the middle of the hotel room with the phone in my hand and the quiet pressing in from all sides.

Ulla Adel.

For the first time since I was steered out of my own boardroom I felt something other than rage and humiliation sitting in my chest. It was small… it was fragile and I was not going to trust it too much yet.

But it was there.

Ulla was en route waiting to talk.

Silas Moretti had walked into my boardroom and taken my company and stood there looking at me like I was already finished.

He was wrong.

I was not even close to finished.

I reached for the minibar for the first time that night and poured myself one drink, just one, and raised the glass slightly toward the window and the city beyond it.

"Your move," I said quietly to nobody in particular.