Nate arrived with a folder thick enough that Gilbert eyed it before he’d even taken his coat off, and Julian was already at the dining table by the time Arianne came down with Lexx balanced on one hip, the baby monitor left upstairs since its subject had opinions about being left in a crib during daylight hours.
"Tell me you found something," Gilbert said, pulling out a chair.
"I found the same something three times, which is better." Nate spread the folder open across the table, three separate printouts lined up side by side. "Dominic’s original shell registration. The Conway holding structure. And now the Summers-Blackwood partnership paperwork, before Rafael scrubbed it. Look at the registered agent listed on all three."
Gilbert leaned over the pages, silent for long enough that Julian lost patience and leaned in himself.
"Same agent," Julian said. "Same name, three different structures, over what, ten years?"
"Longer, in one case." Nate tapped the oldest printout. "One agent doesn’t build three separate hiding places for three separate clients by accident. Somebody used the same contractor because the contractor was reliable, and reliable people don’t advertise. This is the closest we’ve ever gotten to a name that isn’t Dominic’s."
"So we pull the agent’s records," Julian said, already reaching for his phone like the next step was obvious. "We go straight at whoever’s behind that registration and we don’t wait for permission."
"We don’t have standing to pull anything without tipping our hand that we’re looking." Gilbert’s voice stayed even, though his jaw had set the way it did whenever Julian moved faster than the room. "If this agent’s still active, going in loud alerts whoever’s paying him. We’ve spent years getting this close. I’m not blowing it on impatience."
"I’m not talking about impatience. I’m talking about Rafael just handed us a live wire, and every day we sit on it is a day it goes cold again." Julian’s voice hadn’t risen, but the edge in it had. "We keep saying patient. Patient got us nowhere for years."
"Patient got us here," Gilbert said. "Which is further than we’ve ever been."
Arianne let the argument run its first lap without stepping into it, adjusting Lexx higher on her hip as he grabbed for the edge of the folder with both fists, delighted by the crinkling sound the paper made under his grip.
"No, that’s not a toy." She caught his hand gently, redirecting him toward the teething ring clipped to her sleeve instead, and he accepted the trade without protest, already too young to hold a grudge about anything for longer than it took to find a replacement.
"He’s got good instincts," Nate said, mouth twitching despite the tension in the room. "Straight for the evidence."
"He’s got good aim, that’s different." Arianne settled Lexx against her shoulder, patting his back in the same rhythm she used at bedtime, and the room settled around the small, ordinary business of keeping a baby content. Gilbert used the pause to sit back, and Julian’s shoulders came down half an inch from where they’d climbed.
"I want to move on this too," Arianne said, once Lexx had settled into gnawing on the teething ring with both hands. "But not tonight, and not without Franz. He’s two days from home, and whatever we decide next, I want it decided with all five of us in the room, not four of us and a phone call."
"Two days is a long time to sit on a live wire," Julian said, though the fight had gone out of the words.
"Two days is nothing compared to how long we’ve already waited." Gilbert’s tone had softened enough to take the edge off contradicting him again. "We can wait until Franz is standing in this kitchen instead of a hotel three time zones away."
Nate gathered the printouts back into the folder, squaring the edges the way Gilbert usually did with his own paperwork, an old habit picked up from years of watching him do it. "I’ll keep pulling whatever’s still available in the meantime. Carefully. Nothing that tips anyone off, nothing that moves before we’ve actually agreed on a plan."
"That’s fair." Julian exhaled, the last of his urgency settling into something closer to patience, or at least a passable imitation of it. "I still think two days is going to feel longer than it sounds."
"It usually does." Gilbert reached over and turned the folder ninety degrees, squaring it with the edge of the table out of pure habit. "But I’d rather it feel long and go right than feel short and blow up in our hands. We’ve had enough of the second kind these last few years."
"Nobody’s arguing that." Julian rubbed a hand over his jaw. "I just don’t like sitting on something this concrete after years of chasing things this vague."
"None of us like it." Arianne adjusted Lexx again, who’d abandoned the teething ring in favor of grabbing a fistful of her hair, tugging with the same total lack of self-awareness he applied to everything else. "But two days of discomfort is a small price for getting this right the first time we act on it. We’ve built this family on doing things together instead of racing ahead of each other. I’m not changing that now because Rafael handed us something interesting."
Gilbert closed the folder himself this time, sliding it toward the center of the table where none of them would forget it sat there. "Two days, then. Full council, Franz included, and then we decide what happens with this together."
Nobody argued further, though Julian’s fingers drummed once against the table before he stilled them, the closest thing to agreement he was willing to offer out loud. Lexx, uninterested in any of it now that the folder had stopped making noise, buried his face against Arianne’s shoulder and yawned wide enough that even Gilbert’s mouth curved despite himself.
"On that note," Arianne said, "I think someone’s ready for a nap before the rest of us finish deciding anything."
She left them at the table with the folder between them, the argument settled into something calmer than it had started, and carried Lexx upstairs to the sound of Julian and Gilbert picking the same debate back up in lower voices, patient enough now to wait two more days, even if neither of them entirely liked it.