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“You already know what she’s up to.”
“I have my suspicions.”
“Bullshit. You know as well as I do what she’s doing.”
Toxic raised her hand. “I don’t.”
“She’s running. She’s selling that whole damn empire of hers. Probably been bleeding it dry for years, ever since her daughter lost her mark, squeezing her own family and the workborn around her just to get a few more credits before she flees.”
“We don’t know that,” Lila cautioned.
“Of course we do. She’s going to run to Burgundy and retire like all the other disgraced highborns, with or without her family. I suspect without, if you believe Simon is really in the dark about all this.”
“Don’t start with Simon. He’s just a boy.”
“Fine, perhaps she’ll send for him after he’s all used up from the vineyard. But she’s running. You know it as well as I do.”
“We don’t know anything of the sort.” It wasn’t that Chairwoman Wilson possessed too many scruples for such an act—Lila just wasn’t convinced that the woman had enough intelligence for it.
Then again, liquidating assets without an heir and transferring them out of the country was illegal and difficult to manage, unless one wanted a slave’s term. If Chairwoman Wilson was smart enough to hide her money without getting caught, then she could have recovered her family’s fortune after her mother’s idiocy, rather than fallen even lower.
It didn’t make sense.
Lila turned back to her laptop. She traced the deposits in Teach’s account to a bank inside Saxony, First New Bristol. Not only did Lila bank there, she owned controlling shares, purchased as a way to conceal some of her money from her mother. It definitely wasn’t the most honorable of banks, but that had been the point of purchasing it. Her funds would remain undisturbed, and it gave her a good way to spy on the funds of morally ambiguous highborns and lowborns in the city.
Chairwoman Wilson’s activity must have slipped through.
Lila did the hack herself, since she did not want Toxic near the bank that held part of her nest egg. She called out a few names, and Toxic searched through several public databases, both of them looking for a match.
After an hour, the pair had an answer. “Some of the money is coming to Teach’s account as a consultant’s salary from a lowborn business,” Lila explained. “That business is partnered with Wilson-Kruger, but you have to go back through a dozen layers to find it.”
“What does that mean?” Toxic asked.
“It means that the company is an empty shell within a shell within a shell.”
Toxic considered the implications. “Is that proof?”
“Not really. It doesn’t prove much at all. It just shows that the chairwoman sent money to a sketchy bank account, and that bank account sent—”
“Bribed,” Tristan interjected.
“—sent,” Lila said over him, “money to a few militiamen after they helped with a particularly difficult case on her property. That is how her lawyer will frame it, and she’ll never be charged.”
“It bothers me when you talk like them,” Tristan said.
“Then get over it, don’t listen, or don’t ask for my help.”
“What about the money in the account, though?” Toxic asked. “Can’t we turn her in? It’s illegal to hide money like that, isn’t it?”
“What reason could Bullstow give for peeking into her financials? The militia can’t just stroll up to the High Council of Judges with an anonymous tip and expect to see financial information for a multimillion credit empire. Besides, the money is set up to go somewhere else if that happens, mark my words. Burgundy protects their clients.”
Toxic’s eyes passed from Tristan to Lila’s hood and back to Tristan. “Well, if it helps, I did confirm that there’s no Edward Teach in the commonwealth and in Burgundy. There aren’t that many Teaches left, actually. I’ve been in every database I know of. I can’t believe that no one would name their kid after a pirate.”
&
nbsp; “Me neither,” said Tristan, nodding toward Dixon when he gave a thumbs-up and a grin.
“I can,” Lila added, already digging into the second account.
