Chapter 3: The Verification Step

Dracona stepped back into the room and closed the door behind her. The lock clicked into place with the same sound it had made every time before. Harry lifted his head again when he heard it. She stayed near the door for a moment, watching the way his eyes tracked her across the floor.

“Hale’s disappearance points to internal interference,” she said. “Someone inside your family wanted him gone before anyone could reach him.”

Harry adjusted his shoulders against the strap. The movement barely registered on the concrete. “That tracks. He handled too many direct lines to walk away without orders. The question becomes whose orders.”

She crossed to the table and set her phone down on the surface. The device sat between them like another piece of evidence that needed sorting. Harry watched the motion without commenting on it.

“We could pull the last communication logs through a secure channel,” he said. “Hale kept everything routed through his own encryption. If I still have access to the device my handler left in the car, the logs stay intact.”

Dracona considered the request. Giving him any reach toward a device meant giving him a tool, no matter how limited the scope. Yet without some form of verification, the names he had given her remained floating statements with no anchor.

“One hand,” she said. “I remove the strap on your right hand. You access the device while I stand there. No second attempts if the first one fails.”

Harry nodded once. The single movement carried no additional weight than the previous one had. She moved behind the chair and worked at the buckle until the strap loosened enough for his arm to slide free. The circulation returned to his fingers in small increments, and he flexed them once before accepting the device she placed in his palm.

The screen illuminated under his thumb. Lines of coded text scrolled upward as he navigated through the encrypted folders. Dracona stood close enough to watch each entry appear, close enough to see the timestamp markers that lined the log files.

“Last transmission from Hale sits at 02:14 on the twenty-second,” Harry said. “The message went out through a relay that routes through three different carriers before landing at the destination. The address points to a contact inside the Malfoy organization. Code designation C-7.”

She leaned closer to the display. The designation matched internal routing patterns she recognized from routine briefings. C-7 had handled logistics for her father’s eastern shipments for the past eighteen months. The man’s name appeared in clearance documents and payment ledgers she had reviewed herself.

Harry tapped the entry to expand the metadata. The destination code resolved to a secondary account registered under a holding company she knew her father maintained. The account had processed three separate transfers in the days leading up to the pier exchange.

She reached over his shoulder and entered the account number into her own phone. The cross-reference pulled up transaction records that aligned with the same window Hale had used. One of the transfers carried the same routing sequence that had protected the original payment codes Viktor carried to the pier.

The connection sat between them now without any remaining ambiguity. Harry closed the device and handed it back without attempting to retain it. She secured his wrist again, tightening the strap until the buckle clicked into its previous position.

The room held the same low ventilation hum it had carried since she first brought him here. Dracona looked at the confirmation on her screen once more, reading the account holder designation that appeared in the finalized data set. The name matched a member of her father’s inner circle she had trusted without question since the first day she handled eastern logistics.