Chapter 74 DEX

Chapter 74 DEX
I hadn't expected to like her.

That was the honest truth. When I first found out about Nadia’s double life, my entire plan was straightforward—find the evidence, hand it to Zane, and spend the next two weeks being right about it while he dealt with his feelings. That was how it was supposed to go. I was good at finding things out, and I was even better at being right.

Except she'd gone and turned herself in before I could even finish building my case. Which meant the whole plan went out the window, and somehow I ended up working right next to her instead. And somewhere along the way, I'd started to actually like her. But I wasn't going to look at that too hard.

The thing about Nadia was that she worked like someone who had something to prove, except she wasn't doing it for anyone to watch or notice. She was just built that way, and I respected that more than I wanted to admit.

What I found on Avery took four days and a favor from a contact inside the city's financial records system. I knew this wasn’t the kind of favor you asked for twice, so I made sure to get
everything I needed the first time.

Diane Avery had a private business registered in a state she had no professional ties to. The business had been receiving payments over six years from a foundation called the Clarity Initiative. I'd seen that name before, briefly, in a list of organizations linked to hunter-connected nonprofit organizations. 

On the surface, the Clarity Initiative looked clean. They were a public educational nonprofit with a website, a board of directors, and community event sponsorships. The whole thing looked really nice from the outside.

But I traced the money, following every single lead until I landed on a real estate holding company that owned four properties right here in Crestfall. Two of those properties were listed as vacant. One of them was less than two blocks from Crestfall Arena.

I went to look at all four properties in person before I said a word to anyone. That part I kept to myself until I had pictures to go with it.

The third property—the one near the arena—had fresh tire tracks in the parking lot behind it, and the tire tracks all looked like they were from several heavy vehicles. The building might have been listed as vacant, but something was definitely moving in and out of it.

I brought it all to Zane and Nadia together, which was new for me. Six weeks ago I would have gone straight to Zane alone and let him decide what to do next. Things were different now.

Nadia went through the pictures one by one without saying anything. There was something very intense about the way she looked at them, as though she was reading them rather than just seeing them, and the information she was obtaining from them was being sorted and filed in her brain immediately. 

I recognized that because it was the same thing I did.

"This building has a basement entrance," she said, tapping one of the photos. "I know that entrance. Marcus used it to store some equipment for the original attack." She paused just slightly. "Which means either he moved back in after we stopped him, or he never fully left."

I looked at Zane. Zane looked at the picture. His jaw didn't move, but something behind his eyes did.

"He's been running a base two blocks from my stadium for six weeks," he said, his voice completely flat. "And we didn't know."

It wasn't a question. He was just saying it out loud, probably because saying it out loud made it real and that would help him figure out how to deal with it.

I pulled up the city records on my laptop and turned the screen around. "The building's inspection is scheduled for next Thursday. And the inspector on the rotation…" I waited for them to read the name.

Nadia read it. She went very still immediately.

It was the same inspector who had signed off on the construction of the Fangs' underground training facility five years ago. The facility we were currently sitting in.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Someone has been managing their access to the city's systems for a long time," Nadia finally said slowly. "Longer than you’ve known about Marcus, This didn't start with the mission he sent me on."

Zane leaned back in his chair, carrying that particular look he always had when something clicked into place and the picture it made was worse than he'd been expecting.

"I keep thinking about the facility," he said. "If they've had their hands on city records this whole time, they knew about this place before we thought they did."

"Possibly," Nadia said. "And they might have been watching for the right moment to use what they know."

I closed the laptop. "Whatever it is, the end goal is the same."

They both looked at me.

"We have a much bigger problem than we thought," I said.