Chapter 9 - The Final AuditGrace stared at him, her eyes wide with confusion. "What are you talking about? Your accounts are frozen! Your assets are seized! Vance has the master ledger, and we're facing life in federal prison!"
Dominic let out a low, gravelly chuckle.
"Grace, did you really think a man who survived thirty years in the Bellhaven underworld kept his entire fortune in a single domestic bank account?"
He stepped closer, lowering his voice to a whisper that cut through the cold prison wind.
"When you audited my books three months ago, what was the first thing you told me?"
Grace searched her memory frantically. "I... I told you the North Wharf contract was garbage."
"And before that?" Dominic prompted. "When you reviewed the old 1998 corporate restructuring files from when I first took over the city?"
Grace’s breath caught. Her eyes widened as the pieces violently clicked together in her mind.
"The... the dormant shell corporations," she gasped. "The ones registered under old diner names in rural Pennsylvania. You didn't just hide assets... you built a completely parallel financial infrastructure that doesn't even touch Rourke Holdings."
"Precisely," Dominic smiled coldly. "Marcus Vance stole a ledger. He handed the federal government a hollowed-out corporate shell designed specifically to look like a criminal enterprise—a trap I set five years ago just in case an ambitious federal prosecutor tried to make a career out of my name."
Grace stared at him in absolute awe. "The raid... the arrest... you let them take us?"
"I couldn't clean house while sitting on the fifty-fifth floor," Dominic said smoothly. "The federal government just did what my corrupt lieutenants and traitorous lawyers couldn't do: they swept away every single rat, parasite, and snitch in my organization under the guise of a massive RICO sweep."
Dominic reached into his orange jumpsuit pocket and pulled out a small, encrypted flash drive—smuggled past prison guards through channels Grace didn't even want to imagine.
He pressed it gently into her hand.
"And as for you, Grace Mercer?" Dominic whispered, his eyes locking onto hers with intense, burning respect. "You were never the criminal mastermind. But you are the only person on this earth smart enough to execute what comes next."
"What happens next?" Grace breathed.
"Tomorrow morning," Dominic said, "my federal appeal—filed by a team of constitutional lawyers whose existence the DOJ doesn't even know about—will expose Marcus Vance’s perjury and federal entrapment. The case collapses. We walk out of here as free citizens."
May you like
He stepped back, standing tall against the Philadelphia skyline visible over the prison wall.
"And when we walk out, Bellhaven won't belong to the cartels, the politicians, or the federal government anymore. It will belong to us."
