Chapter 6
"I don't doubt you," Milo lied softly. He pulled his hands free and reached up, cupping Gabriel’s stubbled jaw, tracing the line of his cheek with tender, feather-light fingers. "I know exactly what you've done for me."
Gabriel let out a ragged sigh of relief, leaning into Milo’s palm, closing his eyes like a weary king receiving absolution from his priest.
"Come to bed," Gabriel murmured, kissing the inside of Milo’s wrist. "You need eight hours. Tomorrow is the last day of the old world."
"Yes," Milo agreed, his lips curving into a faint, serene smile. "The last day."
***
At two-thirty in the morning, the penthouse was swallowed by shadows.
The rhythmic, deep breathing of Gabriel beside him told Milo that the sleeping pill slipped into Gabriel’s herbal tea had taken full effect. Gabriel lay on his back, his heavy right arm flung across Milo’s waist, pinning him to the mattress in that habitual, suffocating embrace.
Milo did not panic. He did not rush.
With agonizing patience, moving millimeter by millimeter, Milo slid his hips out from beneath Gabriel’s forearm. He replaced his own body with a cylindrical bolster pillow, tucking the down-filled roll gently against Gabriel’s ribs. Gabriel muttered something unintelligible in his sleep, his arm curling instinctively around the fabric, pulling it tight against his chest.
Milo slipped out of bed, his bare feet making no sound on the hardwood floor.
He wore only dark cotton shorts and a thin grey t-shirt. The room was freezing, the air conditioning whispering through the ceiling grates like falling sand.
Milo crossed the living room to Gabriel’s tour bag.
He didn't need to turn on the lights. His eyes had adjusted to the pale amber glow filtering through the sheer curtain shears from the street lamps below.
He knelt by the bag, unzipped the interior lining, and extracted the black leather folio.
He carried it to the writing desk, sat down, and plugged a sterile, unformatted flash drive into his laptop. He inserted Gabriel’s thumb drive into the secondary port.
The contents loaded instantly.
It wasn't just the contract with Vance.
Gabriel, in his arrogant need to preserve leverage, had kept meticulous records of his own betrayal. There were scanned copies of Crestline’s banking routing numbers in the Cayman Islands. There were audio recordings—compressed WAV files of phone conversations between Gabriel and Vance’s primary fixer, a man named Marcus Kane.
Milo slipped a pair of wireless earbuds into his ears, double-clicked the most recent audio file, dated five days ago, and pressed play.
Marcus Kane’s gravelly, smoker’s baritone filled Milo’s ears: *"The line is set at two sets to love, Moreau. First set, you keep it close—take it to 5-7 or a tiebreak so the in-play odds drive the live betting volume up. Second set, you pull the plug early. Break of serve in the third game, then you call the trainer for the shoulder. That gives Vance the cover he needs for the integrity inspectors."*
Then came Gabriel’s voice. Smooth. Unshaken. The voice of a veteran discussing a routine corporate merger: *"And the Chen transfer?"*
*"Handled,"* Kane replied. *"Apex’s legal team has already registered the power of attorney paperwork in Panama. Once the match ends and you confirm the straight-sets result, Chen’s ATP profile and management contract transfer to Crestline. Our transport will be outside the players' entrance at the south gate. You don't say a word to him. You take your post-match press conference, plead heartbreak over the shoulder, and exit through the VIP garage. We collect the boy from the player lounge before he realizes you've left."*
A beat of silence on the tape.
Milo held his breath, wondering—just for a fraction of a second—if Gabriel had hesitated. If there was even a shred of human reluctance in the man who had shared his bed for three years.
Gabriel’s voice returned, cool and untroubled: *"He’s sensitive. Don't send heavy-handed goons to pick him up. Send someone in a suit who can tell him I was called to an emergency medical evaluation. Keep him calm until he signs the standard onboarding documents for Crestline."*
*"We know how to handle racehorses, Moreau. Just make sure you hit the net when Kane tells you to hit the net."*
*"The match is done,"* Gabriel said. *"Consider your books balanced."*
The audio file ended with a soft click.
Milo sat in the dark, the earbuds humming with low white noise.
He didn't feel rage. Rage was hot, explosive, sloppy. Rage was the kind of emotion that made a player swing wildly on break point and send the ball into the grandstand.
What Milo felt was absolute, arctic stillness.
He dragged the audio files, the contract PDFs, and the offshore routing schedules onto his clean flash drive. The transfer progress bar crawled from zero to one hundred percent in eight seconds.
*Ping.*
Milo ejected the clean drive and tucked it into the hidden zipped pocket of his running shorts. He returned Gabriel’s thumb drive to the folio, zipped the leather compartment back into the tour bag, and restored every zipper pull to its original millimeter-perfect position.
Now came the second phase.
Milo reopened his laptop. He didn't go to the police. Going to the French authorities or local private security was suicide; Vance had detectives on his payroll across three European jurisdictions. If an investigation was opened before the match, Vance would simply pull the plug, cancel the bets, vanish into the Mediterranean, and execute Gabriel and Milo quietly in a private villa.
Milo needed a stage so bright, so violently public, that a bullet could not be fired without blinding the entire world.
He opened an encrypted proton-mail window.
He addressed the email to three separate recipients: First: The Chief Integrity Officer of the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) in London. Second: The senior investigative sports editor at *L'Équipe*, who had spent two years hunting syndicate fixing on the ATP Challenger tour. Third: The direct operational desk of the French Central Directorate of the Judicial Police (DCPJ) — Anti-Corruption and Financial Crimes Division.
In the subject line, Milo typed: **EVIDENCE OF MULTI-MILLION-DOLLAR MATCH-FIXING AND ASSET TRAFFICKING: GRAND SLAM MEN’S DOUBLES FINAL.**
In the body of the email, Milo wrote with ruthless, clinical precision:
*Attached are the authenticated contractual documents, offshore escrow accounts, and recorded execution protocols between Julian Vance (Apex Holding / Crestline Financial) and Gabriel Vance-Moreau regarding the outcome of tomorrow night’s final.*
*The fix mandates a straight-sets defeat (0-2) for Vance-Moreau and Chen, engineered to clear a €4.2 million private gambling debt and default public betting pools.*
*Do not intervene before the match. If you move early, the syndicate will wipe their offshore accounts, execute the participants, and suppress the evidence.*
*The criminal act will be formally consummated during the match itself. Vance’s primary enforcers, including Marcus Kane, will be present in Box 14-B of Court Philippe-Chatrier to oversee the outcome and execute the unlawful physical detention of Milo Chen.*
*Position your teams at the south tunnel exits, the broadcast control center, and the VIP hospitality suites. When the final point is concluded, the entire offshore syndicate will be in active, unhedged financial collapse. Move then.*
*Attachments will decrypt automatically via cloud-release key at 21:00 CET—the scheduled match time.*
