Chapter 597: Seven Companies

The trail that began with Marcus Vane continued through seven companies, and Freya could feel the investigation changing shape again. Seven companies appear repeatedly across the payment network.

Derek kept the work inside legal boundaries. Corporate records were obtained through counsel, investigators documented what they could observe lawfully, and technical evidence remained separate from rumor. Louis had enough influence to make shortcuts possible, which was exactly why Freya insisted they avoid them.

Some were competitors, while others were investment vehicles with no obvious public connection to Louis.

The emerging picture bothered Louis in a way the Crosswind mysteries rarely did. Predictive software was unsettling, but betrayal had a human face. These were people who had sat in meetings with him, accepted his trust, and then used information about his habits to calculate when he would be weakest.

Freya understood why his first instinct was anger. She also knew anger made Louis dangerously efficient. Years earlier he might have responded by quietly crushing every company involved before anyone understood what happened.

Now he told her what he wanted to do before doing it.

Sometimes Freya disagreed. Sometimes she approved. Occasionally she told him his idea sounded like something a dramatic antagonist would propose, which Louis never found as funny as she did.

The teasing did not make the stakes smaller. It simply reminded both of them that the people they had become were not identical to the profiles sitting in old databases.

Sunroom remained busy as the cultural center moved toward another construction milestone. The redesigned atrium had passed inspection, and Freya stood beneath the new reinforcement one morning with Helen, looking up at work that had nearly become the studio's first major failure.

Instead, the crisis had become proof that the team could recover.

Freya liked that lesson more than stories about perfection.

Awake Stories had its own milestone when the new imprint finalized covers for its first releases. Freya reviewed them in a conference room filled with ordinary arguments about typography, positioning, and whether one cover looked too much like every other romance novel online.

For an hour, nobody mentioned observers, conspiracies, or predictive models.

She considered the meeting excellent.

At home, the investigation returned to the center of conversation. Louis spread copies of verified documents across the table while Freya updated her notebook.

She had stopped asking whether every discovery was somehow connected to her transmigration. Some things clearly were not. Greed did not require another universe. Corporate rivals did not need supernatural explanations to exploit a useful technology.

That realization made the story both simpler and uglier.

Crosswind had not created every bad person involved. It had given existing ambitions better tools.

The hidden manuscript remained sealed. Freya refused to read ahead even when a chapter title might theoretically warn them about a suspect. Evidence obtained from an unread predictive story would contaminate every decision afterward.

Louis supported the rule now without argument.

Before bed, Freya looked at the growing list of names in her notebook and then crossed out the word fate from an old margin note.

Evelyn remained available through counsel but was not treated as automatically trustworthy simply because some of her claims had been confirmed. Freya wanted corroboration for every major accusation.

Mercer continued examining the predictive reports themselves and found repeated warnings that confidence scores were probabilistic, not guarantees. The consortium had often ignored those warnings when the forecasts suited its plans.

Derek called that arrogance. Freya called it the oldest mistake in the story: believing a written outcome mattered more than the person living through it.

What they were uncovering looked less like fate with every passing day.

It looked like people trying to manufacture outcomes and becoming furious when human beings refused to cooperate.

Freya closed the notebook.

That, at least, was a kind of enemy she understood.