He looked older than he had at Elliot’s funeral, the dark circles under his eyes matching the charcoal gray of his suit.

He didn’t look up immediately when I walked in; he was staring at three thick blue folders spread across his desk.

“Sit down, Avery,” he said softly, gesturing to the leather chair opposite him.

I sat, the smell of old paper and stale coffee filling my nose.

“Did you secure the yard?” he asked.

“Calvin is checking every vehicle,” I said. “They cut the brake lines on the lead truck. It was meant to look like an accident on the pass.”

Malcolm closed his eyes for a brief moment and rubbed his temples.

“It is worse than we thought,” he said.

He opened the first blue folder and slid a spreadsheet across the polished wood toward me.

“I spent the afternoon going through your uncle Elliot’s private ledger,” Malcolm said. “And I ran a trace on the corporate filings for Vanguard Transport.”

Vanguard Transport was our primary competitor, a massive logistics conglomerate that had been trying to buy Northline’s mountain routes for three years.