Chapter 12
Chapter 12: The Price of Ghost Hunting
By Thursday, the tension within the DeLuca mansion had become thick enough to choke on. Enzo had doubled the guard details, turning the North Shore estate back into a fortress. He spent his nights in the basement vault, staring at Nathan's old encrypted files, looking for a name, a ghost, anything he had missed.
"You're tracking a dead man's shadow, Boss," Marco said, tossing a fresh intelligence report onto the desk. "We tracked the black sedan Harper saw. The plates are cold, registered to a dead woman in Gary, Indiana. But the tracking tech we pulled from the traffic cams shows it’s bouncing between the financial district and the old shipping yards."
Enzo didn't look up from his laptop. "Nathan missed something, Marco. Or he didn't have time to write it down. Preston Whitcomb didn't build his empire alone. A man that cowardly needs muscle to hide behind. If Miles Turner was his shield, who was his ledger?"
The door to the vault opened, and Harper walked down the concrete steps. She wasn't cowering anymore. She wore a tailored black blazer, her shoulders straight, though her eyes were shadowed with exhaustion. She walked straight to the table, looking at the complex financial web Enzo had mapped out on the whiteboard.
"You're looking in the wrong place," Harper said, her voice cutting through the men's speculation.
Enzo turned, raising an eyebrow. "Am I?"
"You're looking at the banks my father owned," Harper said, her finger tracing a line on the board toward a small, obscure logistics company listed in the footnotes of Nathan's files. "Preston hated banks. He used to say that any institution that could be regulated could be betrayed. He didn't keep his real reserves in Zurich. He kept them in raw assets. Gold, bearer bonds, diamonds. And he used Vance Logistics to move them."
Enzo stood up, his interest piqued. "Vance? That's a mid-tier freight company out of O'Hare. They're clean."
"They're clean because Julian Vance is my cousin," Harper said, her voice dropping into a bitter register. "Preston's nephew. He’s the one who handled the distribution whenever my father wanted to 'clean' a property. If the money is moving, Julian is the one turning the key."
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Enzo stepped closer to her, his hand reaching out to touch her cheek, his thumb brushing over her cheekbone. "Why didn't you mention him during the trial?"
"Because Julian died five years ago in a boating accident off the coast of Miami," Harper whispered, looking directly into Enzo’s eyes. "Or at least, that’s what the obituary said. But looking at these shipping routes... those are Julian's signatures. He's not dead, Enzo. He’s just hiding in the dark, waiting to inherit the throne."
