Savage Saints Mc : Claimed By Four Monsters

Chapter 7

Soren

My father used to say that information was the only currency that never lost value. He said it at the breakfast table. He said it in the car. He said it the way other fathers said things like work hard or be kind, like it was the foundation everything else was built on. I was six the first time I heard it. By the time I was twelve, I understood what he actually meant.

People were variables, Information was power, Everything else was noise. He worked for a government intelligence division whose name changed three times during his career depending on who was in charge and what needed to be plausibly denied. He was good at his job. Exceptionally good. The problem was that he was also good at selling what he found to whoever was paying, and eventually those two things stopped being compatible, and the division cut him loose with a settlement and a silence agreement and nothing else.

He died when I was twenty-four. I did not grieve him the way sons are supposed to grieve fathers. I grieved the version of him I had needed as a child and never had. That took about three days. Then I went back to work. I inherited his gift from him, Not his corruption. That was a choice actually, and I made it early and I have kept it every day since.

I sat at my desk now with three open laptops and a cold cup of coffee and the note I had just slipped under Isolde's door sitting at the center of everything like a stone I had dropped into still water.

‘Your father came to us first.’

Four words, and they were true.. That was where I started when I didn't know what else to give someone. The smallest true thing.

Damien Vale had walked into contact with Kael's network three years ago through a chain of introductions I had arranged myself. He was a financial investigator, private sector, the kind of man who spent years untangling money that other people had spent years hiding. He was careful. He was thorough. And he had found something inside the Aldric Voss financial structure that was large enough and specific enough that he knew he couldn't take it to the police without it disappearing.

So he came to us instead. I remembered the first time I saw his file. The photograph of a man in his late forties, unremarkable face, the kind of tiredness that lived in the eyes rather than the body. I ran his background in four hours and it was a very clean record, no criminal contact. One daughter working in London, one daughter finishing university. A man with everything to lose who had decided to lose it anyway because what he found was too large to sit on.

Kael met with him twice. I was present for both.

Damien Vale was not brave in the loud way. He was brave in the quiet way, which is rarer and harder to sustain. He shook hands with Kael across a table and he laid his evidence out in careful order and he said: "I need to know this gets used. I need to know it doesn't just disappear into another arrangement."

Kael told him it wouldn't disappear. Kael meant it. I believed that then and I believed it now.

Damien was dead twenty-nine days later.

I had run every possible thread on his death. Heart attack, the official verdict said. No marks. No witnesses. A man alone in his flat who stopped breathing in the night. Clean and quiet and final. Aldric Voss's preferred method when he wanted someone gone without noise.

What I had never been able to confirm was whether Aldric found out about Damien on his own or whether something in Kael's operation leaked it. A name passed in the wrong direction. A meeting logged somewhere it shouldn't have been. I had looked for that answer for three years and I had found nothing definitive, which was its own kind of answer. Absence of proof was not proof of absence. It just meant whoever was responsible had been careful.

Kael did not have Damien killed. I was certain of that. What I was less certain of was whether Kael had protected him as completely as he had promised.

And that uncertainty was the reason I had written the note.

I picked up the cold coffee and put it down again. Across the hall, I could see the thin line of light under Isolde's door. She was still awake. She would be reading those four words right now and either sitting with them or already coming to find me.

She deserved more than four words. She deserved the full shape of it, the exact truth laid out the way her father would have laid out evidence, in order, without softening.

Kael had chosen to keep her in the dark. I understood his reasoning. She was already carrying too much. The Petra situation was live and urgent. Telling her about her father now was a risk he had calculated and decided against.

I had decided differently. It was the first time in four years that I had moved against Kael's judgment. I had sat with the discomfort of that for a long time before I slipped the note under the door. I had turned it over from every angle the way my father taught me, looking for the flaw in my own logic, and I had not found one. She had a right to know. That was not a calculation. It was simply true.

The light under her door didn't move. I turned back to my screen. I heard him before I saw him. Not footsteps, Kael barely made sound when he moved. It was the change in the air. The way a room adjusted itself slightly when he entered it, like even the space around him understood the hierarchy.

I didn't turn around.

"You left her a note."

It wasn't a question. I had known it wouldn't be. I closed the laptop in front of me slowly and turned in my chair.

He was standing in the doorway with his arms at his sides and his face completely still, Something more deliberate than angry.

I looked at him and said nothing..