Bound By Blood - A Dark Romance

Nadia

Chapter Thirty One: Nadia

The Alderton Hotel had been in the northern district for sixty years and had the particular quality of establishments that had survived long enough to develop a character independent of whoever was currently paying to stay in them. Dark wood and high ceilings and the kind of quiet that came from thick walls and staff who had been trained to notice nothing.

Nadia Voss was in the hotel restaurant when they arrived.

She was in her mid thirties, dark haired, with the sharp angular quality that appeared to be characteristic of the Voss family and which Sienna had already catalogued on Damian's face in the first minutes of knowing him. She was dressed well and sitting very straight and she had the expression of someone who had known this meeting was coming and had been deciding how to conduct it for longer than the past twenty four hours.

She looked at Damian when they crossed the restaurant and something moved through her face that was complicated and genuine and not entirely composed.

She looked at Sienna and her expression shifted into something more carefully neutral.

They sat.

For a moment nobody spoke. Sienna sat beside Damian and folded her hands on the table and let the silence be his to break because this was his and she was here as a presence and a witness, not a participant.

"Nadia," he said.

"Damian." Her voice was steady. Lightly accented from six years in eastern cities. "You look the same."

"You don't."

Something flickered in her expression. "No," she said. "I suppose I don't."

Another silence. Shorter this time.

"Tell me you didn't know about Eli," he said. Quietly, without accusation, the specific tone of someone asking a question they need the answer to regardless of what it is.

Nadia looked at him directly. "I didn't know about Eli," she said. "When I went east it was because I needed to go somewhere that wasn't here. That wasn't the name and the city and the weight of all of it." She paused. "Renn found me two years after that. I was already embedded in the eastern network by then, already building something, and his offer was a professional one. It had nothing to do with you or with what happened to Eli."

"And the past three years."

She held his gaze. "I did my job."

"Your job was to help dismantle what I built here."

"My job was to help Renn expand his operation westward. I didn't know the specific target until eight months ago." She set her hands flat on the table. "When I found out the target was you I told Renn I needed a different role."

Sienna watched this without expression. She was reading Nadia the way she read everyone, looking for the seams between what was said and what was true, and she was finding the specific quality of someone telling the truth about the parts they were telling and not lying about the parts they were omitting.

"He moved you to the Velmora approach instead," she said.

Nadia looked at her. Really looked, with the full attention she had been parceling out since they sat down. "You're the one who found the data feed," she said. Not a question.

"Among other things."

Nadia looked at her for a long moment. Then back at Damian. "She's good," she said.

"I know," he said.

"Renn thinks the data feed was your operation. He doesn't know about her." She paused. "I haven't told him."

The restaurant was quiet around them. At a nearby table a business lunch was concluding with the exchange of cards and the performance of mutual satisfaction. The waiter moved through the room with his professional invisibility.

"Why not," Damian said.

Nadia looked at her hands. "Because I came here to tell you something and if I had told Renn about her first he would have moved before I had the chance." She looked up. "The Velmora approach is a distraction. Milan and Constanta are not the real move. He's been in contact with the port authority directly. Through the legitimate logistics infrastructure of the two companies he acquired. He has a legal filing prepared that would give him operational oversight of the northern port facilities through his majority stake in the logistics chain."

Sienna felt the shape of it complete itself with the cold clarity of something that had been partially visible and was now fully so.

Not the cooperative families. Not the intelligence network. Not the pressure and erosion they had been defending against.

A legal filing. Prepared and waiting. The patient three year operation arriving not as an attack but as a piece of paper in a government office.

She looked at Damian.

He was very still.

"When," she said.

"Monday," Nadia said. "Three days from now. If the cooperative doesn't present a counter filing demonstrating consolidated operational control of the port logistics chain before Monday morning, his filing stands and the oversight transfers."

Three days.

"What does a counter filing require," Sienna said.

"Documented proof of consolidated operational control. Signed agreements from every party in the logistics chain demonstrating that the cooperative, not Renn's companies, holds the operational relationship with the port authority." Nadia looked at her steadily. "You'd need every logistics partner in the chain to sign by Sunday evening."

Sienna thought about Hess and his contract. About the cooperative families. About the shape of the legitimate business infrastructure that existed around the port operations. About what was signable and what wasn't and how fast it could be done.

She looked at Damian. He was already looking at her.

"It's possible," she said.

"Tell me how," he said.

She turned to Nadia. "I need everything you have on the filing. The legal specification, the logistics chain map, every party whose signature we need." She held her gaze. "All of it."

Nadia looked at her for a moment. Then she reached into the bag beside her chair and put a folder on the table.

"I brought it with me," she said.

Sienna took the folder and opened it and began reading and the three days started counting down and the work, which had never really stopped, shifted into something faster and more urgent than anything that had come before.