Chapter 5 - THE GIRL FROM THE DOCK|
Dominic ordered the call traced, but Sophie disconnected before his security team could identify her location.
For three minutes, nobody spoke.
Then Lena turned toward him.
“Your brother was involved.”
Dominic looked as though someone had struck him.
“Adrian was seventeen.”
“My brother was nineteen. That didn’t stop anyone from using him.”
“Adrian drowned in a boating accident. His body was recovered. My father identified him.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly to be rehearsed.
Dominic walked to the windowless wall and rested one hand against it.
“I was overseas when it happened. My father told me Adrian had been drinking with friends. The boat hit a submerged obstruction. By the time I returned, the funeral was over.”
“And you believed him?”
“I wanted to.”
Lena understood that feeling. For eight years, she had wanted to believe her father’s death was a mistake rather than a decision. The alternative meant accepting that people had looked at her family and calculated that killing them was profitable.
She returned to the photograph of the children.
“Where was this taken?”
“Anchor House. It was an old summer property near the harbor. My father sold it after Adrian died.”
“Who else used it?”
“Employees. Family friends. Sometimes children from the charitable foundation.”
Lena’s stomach tightened.
“My father took me there once. He said the Reeve family funded a reading program for children whose parents worked on the waterfront.”
Dominic turned.
“You were there?”
“When I was little. I remember a dock and a boy who kept losing at chess. He gave me a book about astronomy because I told him I wanted to understand the stars.”
“Adrian.”
The name settled between them.
Lena remembered a boy with serious eyes and a crooked smile. He had called her Little Professor. He had insisted that the world was larger than the neighborhood where they lived, and that she should never let anyone convince her otherwise.
“I thought I had invented those memories,” she said.
Dominic sat across from her.
“Why would someone tell you to bring a girl to Anchor House?”
“Because the girl is part of whatever they’re hiding.”
“And the ledger?”
“Because it proves what happened.”
He nodded slowly.
“Then we go to Anchor House.”
“Not with a convoy. They’ll see us coming.”
“I’m not sending you into an ambush alone.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
Their eyes met. For the first time, they were not arguing about who controlled the plan. They were trying to determine whether they could trust each other enough to survive it.
Dominic called a discreet security contact and requested an old property map. The records arrived within minutes. Anchor House had two entrances, a disused boathouse, and a service tunnel connecting the cellar to an abandoned storage building.
Lena studied the layout.
“My father designed the original maintenance system. There was a drainage passage beneath the eastern wall.”
“Would it still be accessible?”
“If nobody sealed it.”
Dominic’s phone buzzed.
A photograph appeared on the screen: Sophie Bell leaving a pharmacy, taken from across the street. Her face was older, thinner, but unmistakable.
A message followed.
You want your niece? Come without the police.
Then another photograph loaded.
A small child stood inside a room with pale blue curtains. She wore a blue ribbon and held a book against her chest.
The caption read:
ONE CHILD FOR ONE LEDGER.
Lena rose so abruptly her chair fell backward.
“I'm going.”
Dominic caught her wrist—not hard, but firmly enough to stop her.
“Listen to me. They want you angry because angry people become predictable.”
“She’s my family.”
“And that is exactly why you cannot make this decision alone.”
Lena pulled free.
“You don’t get to tell me what family means.”
His face tightened.
“No. I don’t.”
For a moment, she saw something beneath his control that resembled grief.
Then he placed the property map between them.
“We go together. We keep the ledger hidden. We get Sophie and the child out, and we find out who is behind this.”
Lena looked at the map.
“And if you discover your family ordered my father’s death?”
Dominic held her gaze.
“Then I will help you prove it, even if the evidence destroys me.”
She wanted to believe him.
That frightened her more than the gunfire had.
Because when they left for Anchor House, Lena carried not only the ledger’s coded secrets.
May you like
She carried the first fragile hope she had allowed herself in eight years.
And someone, somewhere, was counting on that hope to get her killed.
