By 3:10, Marina had a copy.
By 3:30, we were on a video call with Judge Ellison’s clerk.
By 4:15, the hearing was scheduled for the next morning.
Ronald had requested a temporary freeze on all Valestone-related accounts, a reopening of financial discovery, sanctions, and immediate access to all corporate records.
He had attached exhibits.
Most were useless.
Corporate registrations. Partial ownership charts. Screenshots from databases. A blurred photo of me leaving an office building in Las Vegas two years earlier.
Then came Exhibit G.
I stopped breathing when I saw it.
Not because it proved Ronald’s claim.
It didn’t.
It was a single page from an internal Valestone acquisition memo dated eighteen months earlier.
Confidential.
Board-level.
Watermarked.
And in the lower right corner, almost too faint to see, was a recipient code.
M.S.
Marina saw it too.
Her face changed.
Just a fraction.
But I knew her well enough.
