Chapter 6 - Unfinished Business
Dawn broke over the Brooklyn waterfront in shades of bruised purple and industrial gray.
Sadi sat at a folding steel table inside the Red Hook safehouse, wrapped in an oversized black cashmere sweater that belonged to Roman. Her bare feet were tucked beneath her on the metal folding chair. On the table lay three open laptops, two hard drives recovered from Marcus Sterling’s office safe, and a stack of financial ledgers that Luca’s men had extracted from Arthur Vance’s private residence during the night.
Roman walked into the room, moving with a slight stiffness from his stitched ribs, but otherwise fully recovered. He wore clean black trousers and a fitted black thermal shirt that showed the breadth of his shoulders.
He carried a mug of steaming black coffee and set it before her, his fingers lightly brushing her shoulder as he leaned over the table.
"Find something?" he asked, his voice low, intimate.
Sadi didn't look up immediately. Her eyes were fixed on a specific series of wire transfers displayed on the center monitor. Her face was deathly pale.
"Sadi?" Roman’s tone shifted, instantly alert. "What is it?"
"The collection agency," she whispered. Her voice was barely audible over the hum of the computer fans.
Roman frowned. "What collection agency?"
"The debt collector," she said, her fingers trembling as she pointed at the screen. "The company that bought my mother’s medical debt two years ago. The one that sent men to bang on our door at nine o'clock at night. The one that garnished my bank accounts and forced me to drop out of Columbia thirty credits shy of my degree."
Roman pulled up a chair beside her, his eyes scanning the corporate routing numbers she had highlighted.
*Ascendant Capital Recovery LLC.*
"Ascendant is a subsidiary," Sadi said, her breath shuddering as she traced the ownership trail through four distinct holding companies on her screen. "It’s owned by *Vanguard Maritime Holdings*. Which is a fully owned shell of *Aegis Consortium*."
She turned to look at Roman, her eyes wide with a mixture of horror and profound, sickening revelation.
"Arthur Vance owned the collection agency that destroyed my life."
The silence in the room became absolute.
Roman didn't speak. He didn't move. But the air around him seemed to crystallize into pure, lethal ice. The muscles in his jaw hardened until they looked carved from granite.
"It wasn't an accident," Sadi continued, tears of pure rage finally spilling down her cheeks. "The experimental clinical trial my mother was enrolled in... it was operated by St. Jude’s Bio-Pharma. A company funded by the Vance family foundation. When the hospital billed the experimental treatments, the Vance foundation intentionally rejected the charitable offset, manufactured an artificial sixty-eight-thousand-dollar debt, and sold it to their own predatory collection arm."
She slammed her fist onto the table, rattling the coffee mug.
"They didn't just profit from contracts and ports, Roman! They were running a predatory debt mill, targeting the families of terminally ill patients in municipal hospitals, forcing them into default, and seizing their homes for pennies on the dollar!"
"And your mother's home?" Roman asked softly, his voice dangerously level.
"We had a small row house in Queens," Sadi choked out, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of the oversized sweater. "My father left it to us when he died. Ascendant foreclosed on it fourteen months ago to satisfy the judgment. I had to move her into a hospice facility three weeks before she passed away. I thought... I thought it was just bad luck. I thought the system was just broken."
Roman reached out and took her shaking hand in his. His grip was warm, solid, anchoring her against the storm of grief and rage that threatened to consume her.
"The system was not broken, Sadi," Roman said with terrifying, absolute conviction. "The system was designed by men like Donovan and Arthur Vance. They are hyenas. They feed on the weak, the sick, and the defenseless."
He lifted her hand to his lips, kissing her knuckles with deliberate, reverent gravity.
"You thought you were saving me in that diner," Roman whispered, his dark eyes boring into hers with an intensity that burned away her tears. "You didn't save me, Sadi. Fate brought you to that table so that you could wield the sword that cuts their heads off."
"How do we destroy them?" she asked, her voice hardening, the grief burning away into pure, diamond-hard resolve. "Legally, they have three layers of offshore insulation. Even with these records, the Southern District will take three years to build an indictment."
"We are not going to the Southern District," Roman said.
He stood up, walking over to a large tactical map pinned to the brick wall.
"Donovan Vance called for an emergency session of the High Council tonight at midnight," Roman explained. "He believes I was wounded or killed on the terrace. He has petitioned the Elder Tribunal to declare the Moretti family's port concessions forfeited due to incapacity."
"The High Council operates under feudal syndicate law," Sadi said, her legal training instantly analyzing the jurisdictional framework. "The 1994 Treaty. Article Nine, Section Four: a family's territorial monopoly can only be revoked if they are proven guilty of treason against the collective peace, or if their leadership is physically unable to govern."
"Precisely," Roman said. "Donovan intends to present Arthur’s original doctored contract as proof that I was colluding with federal investigators to seize the docks. He has manufactured false testimony from Marcus Sterling."
"Then we don't need a federal judge," Sadi said, a cold, brilliant smile breaking across her face as the master strategy snapped into place. "We need the Elder Tribunal. We don't try them under state law. We try them under their own blood code."
"The penalty for presenting fraudulent contracts to the High Council," Roman said softly, "is death. And the immediate forfeiture of all assets to the injured party."
"We have the original drafts," Sadi said, typing furiously on her keyboard. "I have the typography forensics proving Marcus drafted the rider. I have the wire transfers showing Arthur paying the mercenaries from Apex. And now... I have the beneficial ownership records linking their predatory shell companies to unauthorized money laundering across five states without Council approval."
Under Council law, laundering money through unapproved domestic consumer debt without paying the ten percent tithe to the Elders was an unforgivable sacrilege.
"Can you assemble the brief by ten o'clock?" Roman asked.
Sadi closed the laptop with a sharp, decisive snap.
May you like
"I can assemble it in two hours," she said, looking up at him with eyes that burned with absolute conviction. "And then I’m going to read the verdict myself."
***