Chapter 384

[ 1,176 words ]

Julian’s POV

Zane walked into my office without knocking, a thin folder tucked under one arm, the kind of quiet urgency in his stride that told me he had found something before he said a single word.

“You are going to want to see this,” he said, dropping the folder onto my desk.

I opened it.

Bank statements. Wire transfers. A chain of payments routed through three different accounts before landing, eventually, in an account Jude Wolfe had used to cover his living expenses in the months before he arrived in New York.

“Where did this come from?” I asked.

“Marcus,” Zane said. “He has been quietly pulling financial records from the warehouse. It took this long because whoever set this up buried it well. Shell companies stacked on shell companies. Whoever did this understood exactly how to make money disappear p>

I traced the chain of transfers with my finger, following the money backward through each account, each one more carefully obscured than the last.

“This is not the work of an amateur,” I said.

“No,” Zane agreed. “This is the work of someone who has done this before. Someone with resources, patience, and a very good lawyer p>

I reached the final account in the chain, the original source before the money began its careful journey through shell companies designed to make tracing it back nearly impossible.

A holding company. Meridian Crest Holdings.

“Do you recognize the name?” Zane asked.

I did not.

“No,” I said. “Run it. Ownership records, registration history, anything that connects it to a real person p>

“Already tried,” Zane said. “It is registered offshore, in a jurisdiction that does not require disclosure of beneficial ownership. Whoever set this up knew exactly what they were doing. This is not a name that leads anywhere on its own p>

I sat back in my chair, staring at the folder, the careful architecture of the payment trail laid out in front of me like a puzzle missing its most important piece.

“A rival,” I said slowly. “Someone I have outmaneuvered in a deal. Someone whose company lost ground to WEG in the last few years. That is the profile that fits p>

“Perhaps,” Zane said.

“You do not sound convinced,” I said.

“I am not,” Zane admitted. “Business rivals do not usually go to this much trouble to stay hidden. A competitor wants credit, eventually. They want you to know who beat you, even if only in private, even if only once the dust has settled. This person has taken extraordinary care to make sure they are never found at all. That is not the behavior of someone trying to win a deal p>

I thought about that for a long moment, turning the observation over, testing it against everything I already believed about who might want to hurt me badly enough to orchestrate something this elaborate.

“Then what is it the behavior of?” I asked.

Zane was quiet for a moment.

“I do not know yet,” he said. “But I intend to find out. I have already asked Marcus to keep digging on Meridian Crest. If there is a real name behind that holding company, we will find it eventually. Everyone leaves a trail somewhere, even the careful ones p>

I looked back down at the folder, at the name sitting there, meaning absolutely nothing to me, a locked door with no visible key.

“Keep me updated,” I said. “The moment you find anything p>

“You will be the first to know,” Zane said, gathering the folder back up. He paused at the door, looking back at me with something thoughtful behind his expression. “Whoever this is, Julian, they have been planning this for a long time. Longer than Jude has been in the country. That should tell you something p>

“What should it tell me?” I asked.

“That this did not start with Katia,” Zane said. “It started with you. Long before any of us understood what was actually happening p>

He left, and I sat alone with the folder for a long time after the door closed, staring at the name Meridian Crest Holdings until the letters stopped meaning anything at all, turning instead into a shape I could not yet see the edges of.

I pulled up my own contacts list and began working through it methodically, cross-referencing every rival, every failed acquisition, every man who had ever walked away from a negotiating table with me holding the better hand. I made a list of six names: men whose companies had lost ground to WEG over the years, men whose egos I had been bruised in boardrooms across three continents.

None of them fit.

Zane was right about that much. A rival wanted to be known, even quietly, even years later over a drink at some exclusive club where the story could be told as a cautionary tale about crossing Julian Windsor. This was different. Whoever had built this had gone to considerable lengths to ensure their name never surfaced at all, layering shell company behind shell company with the patience of someone who had been planning this for years rather than reacting to a single lost deal.

I thought about the timeline. Jude had arrived in New York only months ago, but the accounts Marcus traced stretched back much further, some of the earliest transfers dating to well before I had ever crossed paths with Katia publicly, before the WEG-IG partnership, before any of the business dealings that might have given a rival reason to resent me.

That timing bothered me more than anything else in the folder.

If this had started before Katia and I were ever connected in any visible way, then Zane’s theory carried more weight than I wanted to admit. This was not about a deal I had won. This was about something older, something that predated my involvement with her entirely, which meant the target had never really been the partnership at all.

It had been me.

I picked up my phone and called Marcus directly, skipping the usual formalities.

“Pull everything you can find on Meridian Crest’s incorporation date,” I said. “I do not care how obscure the filing is. I want to know exactly when this company was created, and I want to know what else was happening in my life at that time p>

“You think this goes back further than the payments to Jude,” Marcus said.

“I think,” I said, “that whoever built this has been patient in a way that should worry both of us p>

Marcus was quiet for a moment on the other end of the line.

“I will have something for you by tomorrow,” he said finally.

I ended the call and sat back in my chair, looking out at the city beyond my window, the lights of Manhattan spread out in their usual indifferent glitter, entirely unbothered by the quiet architecture of whatever was closing in around the edges of my life.

Somewhere out there, someone had spent years building a case against me without once showing their face. I intended to find out who.

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