Chapter 40: Moved Up

Reyes called at six in the morning, before Gia was fully awake, before the coffee had finished, before anything in the house had settled into the shape of a normal day.

“There is no record,” Reyes said. No preamble, the way she had started doing every call since Daniel. “No Internal Affairs review authorized for that floor, that department, that week. Nothing. I checked twice.”

Gia sat up in bed. Marco was already awake beside her, watching her face the way he watched everything.

“Someone impersonated a federal officer to interrogate your brother,” Gia said.

“Someone with enough access to know exactly which credentials to fake and exactly which questions would sound routine enough that a twenty-six-year-old filing clerk wouldn’t think to verify them.” Reyes’s voice was steady, but underneath the steadiness Gia could hear something she had never heard from her before. Not fear exactly. The sound of someone recalculating everything they thought they understood about how safe their own building was. “This is not circumstantial anymore. This is a man with institutional reach using it to hunt a private family’s evidence through a federal employee’s own brother. I am taking this to my supervisor this morning.”

“Is that safe?”

“No,” Reyes said. “But sitting on it is less safe. If Hale finds out I know before I’ve moved, he’ll act first.”

She moved fast.

By nine that morning, Reyes had briefed her supervising attorney, requested emergency judicial oversight on the secondary financial records, and formally flagged Victor Hale as a subject of active investigation rather than a colleague with a blind spot. It was the kind of move that could not be walked back. Once filed, it existed. Once it existed, Hale would know within hours, whether through legitimate channels or through whatever remained of his reach inside the department.

“You just told him you’re coming,” Gia said, when Reyes called again that afternoon.

“I just told him I’m coming,” Reyes agreed. “Which means he stops being careful and starts being fast.”

“How much time did we actually have left,” Gia said, “before this?”

“Less than we told ourselves.” Reyes let that sit for a second. “We stopped counting after the subpoena because nothing forced us to. Now something has. Which means Paris moves up.”

Gia went still.

“How much?”

“The creative director’s testimony window, the deposition schedule, all of it collapses if Hale tries to destroy evidence before the emergency oversight order is served.” Reyes exhaled, and for the first time in this entire investigation, Gia heard exhaustion instead of control. “I need Céleste’s corroboration and the portfolio in federal hands inside seventy-two hours.”

“The show isn’t ready,” Gia said. “The collection isn’t finished being pressed. The venue…”

“I’m not asking you to hold the show early,” Reyes said. “I’m asking you to get on a plane tonight.”

Marco was already pulling up flights before Gia finished repeating the words to him.

“Direct to Paris,” he said. “Redeye. We land tomorrow morning their time.” He looked up. “Céleste needs to know now, not after we land.”

Gia called her from the car on the way to the airport, portfolio in a case at her feet, the sixty-three pages that had taken Ivy three years to build and might now change everything in seventy-two hours.

“They moved it up,” she told Céleste. “I need you to meet Reyes in person within three days. Not at the show. Before it.”

There was a pause on the line. Someone doing fast math on their own safety.

“If I meet a federal prosecutor three days before Hale expects any of this to happen,” Céleste said slowly, “he will know something changed. He will know we know.”

“He already knows,” Gia said. “Your last message wasn’t a lie. Someone tried to warn me weeks ago that Hale had found the florist. He hadn’t. But now he’s found something else, and this time it’s real.”

Another silence.

“Then there is no version of this where I stay hidden,” Céleste said. “Fine. Tell me where.”

The plane sat on the tarmac for forty minutes before takeoff, the kind of delay that meant nothing on any ordinary night and felt like the entire architecture of the plan cracking on this one.

Gia sat with the portfolio case on her lap the whole time, both hands flat on top of it, the way she had once sat with her hands flat on either side of it on a worktable in a studio that felt very far away right now.

Marco watched the tarmac through the window.

“He knows Reyes filed something,” he said. “He doesn’t know what we’re carrying, or that we’re already in the air.”

“Yet,” Gia said.

“Yet,” Marco agreed.

The plane began to move.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, four hours into the flight, Gia’s phone buzzed once with a message that had been sitting in a satellite queue, delayed by altitude, finally breaking through.

She looked at it.

Reyes.

Emergency oversight order was served at 2pm Eastern. Hale was in his office when it happened. An oversight order isn’t an arrest. There was no one authorized to hold him. Witnesses say he did not react. He simply stood up, walked out, and has not been seen since.

Gia read it twice.

Marco leaned over, read it once, and went very still.

“He’s gone,” Gia said.

“Gone doesn’t mean caught,” Marco said. “It means loose.”

Below them, the ocean stretched out dark and endless in every direction, and somewhere ahead of them, seventy-two hours had already started counting down.