C18 Chapter Eighteen

Jules Keane was the kind of man who looked like he could crack open the Vatican’s vault with a single keystroke and have the pope thank him for doing it. When he finally appeared on Bishop’s encrypted video call two days later, his lean face filled the screen with a sharp, knowing smirk, the reflection of six different monitors flickering in his glasses.

“I thought I taught you to call when it was something dramatic, Bishop,” he said with a clipped British accent. “This smells like a funeral. And judging by these files? Possibly yours.”

Bishop leaned back in his chair, eyes cold. “Cut the dramatics. What did you find?”

Jules raised a brow. “Straight to the point. I like that.” He tapped his keyboard. “I traced Dominion Haven through three countries and four ghost networks. Not just a shell it’s a tunnel. Money doesn’t just stop there, it gets siphoned through multiple fronts.”

He pulled up a graphic on-screen. The map of wire transfers fanned out like a web one central node marked Dominion Haven Ltd, with thin red threads shooting out to places like Dubai, Cyprus, Singapore, and finally: Lagos, Nigeria.

Rose’s stomach twisted. “That final account who owns it?”

Jules turned his smirk to her. “That’s where it gets… uncomfortable. The name on the final ledger?”

He tapped a key, and the name appeared on the screen.

Valentina Rosario.

Bishop’s eyes darkened instantly. “You’re sure?”

“As sure as I am that you’ll owe me a 60-year-old bottle of Glenfiddich for this,” Jules said. “The money ends there. Valentina doesn’t move it further. She’s sitting on it holding.”

“Waiting for what?” Rose asked, her voice almost a whisper.

Jules shrugged. “That’s where my reach stops. But from the way these accounts are structured, it looks like she’s not alone. Someone bigger is backing her. Or worse… she’s the front.”

The room fell silent. Lauren tapped her fingers against the edge of the desk, restless.

“So Damien wasn’t running the show,” she muttered. “He was just a cog. Maybe a weak one.”

Bishop stood slowly, his eyes locked on the frozen image of Valentina’s name. “Jules, did you find any internal communication linked to her? Anything encrypted, buried, hidden?”

“One thing,” Jules said, sliding another screen into view. “A failed decryption key embedded inside a dormant email server. I cracked part of the message, but it’s fragmented. Still…”

He pasted the string into the chat.

> “Ensure silence. All loose ends tied before 10/9. Payment confirmed.”

“That’s Damien’s death date,” Rose whispered.

Bishop’s hand clenched into a fist. “So someone paid for him to be erased.”

Jules gave a single nod. “And whoever did… wanted no noise. Which means whatever’s happening next is bigger than you think.”

Lauren exhaled slowly, shaking her head. “We’re standing at the edge of something ugly, aren’t we?”

“No,” Bishop said, voice low. “We’re already inside it.”

Jules’s screen blinked out, replaced by static silence.

Bishop stood at the window, hands braced against the frame, the weight of years pressing between his shoulders. The tension in the room thickened like humidity before a storm. Rose watched his back rise and fall steady, but too careful. Controlled.

“I’ve seen him this way once before,” Lauren whispered, leaning in close. “Right before he went after the man who buried our father’s legacy under blood and stolen accounts.”

Rose swallowed. “And how did that end?”

Lauren didn’t answer.

Instead, Bishop finally turned around, his face unreadable. “We need to move now. She’s holding too much, and whoever’s backing her… they're preparing something.”

Rose nodded, but her mind churned. “We still don’t know what Damien’s role was. Or how deep this runs. Dominion Haven might’ve been his tool, but he was acting on command. That message Jules found ‘all loose ends tied before 10/9’ he was a loose end.”

“And so are we now,” Lauren added flatly.

Bishop crossed the room and pulled open a drawer in his safe. He retrieved a small, hardbound black journal. Leather. Worn. He set it on the table without ceremony.

Rose blinked. “What is that?”

“Damien’s,” Bishop said simply. “I found it in the vault behind his desk.”

He flipped through the first few pages. Names. Coordinates. Numbers. Codes. Rose leaned over it, stunned.

“It’s encrypted,” she murmured. “But not digitally. This is... old-school. Layered in symbols.”

Lauren furrowed her brow. “He wrote it knowing someone might come looking.”

“Which means he was paranoid,” Bishop added. “And careful.”

They sat in silence, the weight of Damien’s secrets staring back at them from the yellowed pages. Rose turned one over and paused.

“What’s this?” she asked, pointing to a phrase inked neatly in the margin beside a string of figures.

“V.R. → mirror room. Eden.”

Lauren tilted her head. “What the hell is the mirror room?”

Bishop straightened, expression unreadable. “It was a private room built into the old estate’s east wing. My father called it ‘Eden’ designed it to be a sanctuary. But I haven’t used it in years.”

“Is it still accessible?” Rose asked.

“Yes. And if Damien left something there, it’s because he didn’t want it to be found easily.”

Lauren pushed off from the desk. “Then that’s where we go next.”

Bishop nodded, but Rose caught a flicker in his eyes. Not hesitation calculation. He was already three steps ahead, trying to solve a maze with too many doors.

She touched his arm. “Whatever’s in there, we find it together.”

He glanced at her, and for a moment, all the sharpness in him softened. “Together.”

Outside, the wind began to shift, tugging faintly at the trees, like the world itself knew something was being uncovered.

And somewhere, far from the safety of boardrooms and estate walls, a woman with fire-colored lipstick and a silver pistol traced her fingers over a photograph of Bishop, Rose, and Damien each face marked with inked X’s.

All but one.

Hers.

Bishop tucked Damien’s journal beneath his arm, the room quiet but crackling with something unspoken. Rose lingered at the door, her eyes trailing the length of the map Jules had shown them lines and numbers, power and silence. Every thread now led to Valentina, but the tension in her chest warned her there was still someone hiding behind the curtains. Someone watching. As Bishop killed the lights, she felt it too a shift, a presence, or maybe just fear brushing past her spine like a whisper. One thing was certain: the deeper they dug, the more dangerous the silence became.