Chapter 55 · 9:00 at the Registry

"Number forty-one." The clerk didn't look up. "Santos, Lila?"

"That's me." I put both hands flat on the counter so they'd stop shaking.

She slid a form back at me. "Certified true copy request. GIS, twenty-nineteen amendment. That's a hundred fifty pesos, and it'll take a minute to pull from archive."

A minute. I'd waited eleven years for this minute and I still almost couldn't say the next part.

"I need the shareholder page specifically. The one with the forty percent block."

Her pen stopped over the receipt book. She glanced up at me for the first time, like the number meant something to her too. "You're aware that's a significant holding."

"I'm aware."

The door behind me opened hard enough to hit the wall.

"Don't process that." Jae Min's voice, flat, already too close. He came around the counter divider like he had a right to, and maybe in this building, with his name on half the leases downtown, he did.

"Sir, this is a public registry, you can't—"

"I'm not stopping the request.