Marcos spread the documents across Cole's dining table like a man laying out a body for autopsy.
I hadn't been in the main living space in daylight. The 3 AM kitchen was ours — stove light, bare feet, the intimacy of a space that only existed between midnight and dawn. But Marcos had called at seven with a voice I'd learned to read as operational-urgent, and Cole had knocked on my deadbolt — knocked, not opened, because he was learning — and said, "We need the table."
The table was twelve feet of reclaimed oak that seated ten and was currently holding the architecture of the 303 in paper. Filing documents. Incorporation records. Property chains. The nesting dolls laid open — Palisade to Front Range Holdings to Ridgeline Systems to Summit Entertainment to the fourteen subsidiary LLCs that formed the circulatory system of an empire built by a boy from a kitchen table who'd lost everything to paper and had spent twelve years learning to make paper work in his favor.
