#Chapter 95: Clean Books

DEREK The problem was that the numbers made too much sense. I leaned back in the chair, eyes burning from the screen, fingers stiff from too many hours toggling between spreadsheets, old scanned reports, and financial summaries from a decade ago. Pierce’s tenure as Gamma was laid out in meticulous detail—Gamma expense ledgers, supply requisitions, training budgets. All of it. Everything was intact. Logged. Balanced. Neat. And that irritated the hell out of me. I didn’t trust neat. I wanted chaos. I wanted sloppiness. I wanted one loose thread I could tug on until the whole damn operation unraveled. I wanted hidden vendor names. Duplicate line items. A red flag buried in a forged invoice. Something—anything—that pointed to Pierce skimming money off the top to bankroll what he would become. But instead? Clean. Efficient. Predictable. Every dollar accounted for, every authorization signed off, every number cross-referenced against a pack-approved audit. It di