Chapter 7 - THE FIRST BETRAYAL|
Dominic pulled Lena behind the concrete support beam just as a shot struck the wall where she had been standing.
The gunman fired again. The bullet ricocheted through the narrow passage, throwing dust into the air.
“Stay down,” Dominic ordered.
“I know how to stay alive.”
“Then do it quietly.”
He drew his weapon and returned fire toward the flash at the end of the corridor. The gunman retreated. Dominic used the moment to reach the emergency panel, ripped away its cover, and forced the manual release.
The metal door lifted several inches.
“Go.”
Lena crawled beneath it, then turned to help him. Together they reached the drainage passage and emerged behind the warehouse as rain hammered the harbor.
Their driver was gone.
So were the two security men.
Dominic scanned the empty road.
“They’ve been taken or ordered away.”
“Which means someone had access to your people.”
His jaw tightened.
“Yes.”
They ran to a secondary vehicle parked near the harbor road. Dominic had hidden the keys inside a magnetic box beneath the rear bumper. Within minutes, they were moving toward Manhattan.
Lena held the folder against her chest.
“Your father knew my father was innocent.”
“Possibly.”
“The report said ‘family leverage.’ My father was being threatened. You were part of that family.”
Dominic glanced at her.
“I was overseas.”
“That doesn’t mean you were uninvolved.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
He spoke without anger, and the honesty unsettled her.
“I spent years believing my father had handled everything after Adrian’s death. I never asked enough questions. I was busy building my own operations, convinced that keeping the business stable meant protecting everyone.”
“And did it?”
“No.”
The single word seemed to cost him something.
At a red light, Lena noticed a small symbol written in the corner of the report: a circle crossed by three short lines.
She knew it.
Her father used the mark whenever a document contained a hidden instruction. It had been part of a private system they used for puzzles when she was a child.
She turned the page sideways and examined the figures printed beneath it.
“These numbers aren’t account references.”
“What are they?”
“Coordinates. Or a substitution cipher based on coordinates.”
She took a pen from the glove compartment and began writing on the back of the page. Five minutes later, a street address emerged.
A storage facility in Queens.
“Your father left a message,” Dominic said.
“He left a way to find the message.”
They drove to the facility and entered using a key concealed inside the pendant’s broken clasp. Unit 314 contained an old suitcase, a box of books, and a small recorder wrapped in oilcloth.
Lena recognized her father’s handwriting on the label.
For my daughter, when she is old enough to understand.
Her throat tightened.
She pressed play.
David Voss’s voice filled the storage unit, older and more tired than she remembered.
“Lena, if you are hearing this, I failed to keep my promise. I wanted you to grow up believing that the world could be trusted. I was wrong about the people who controlled it, but I was never wrong about you.”
She closed her eyes.
“The shipment was not what they claimed. I discovered that the foundation was being used to move money through false charities. I tried to stop it. Elias Shaw told me the arrangement came from the highest level of the family.”
A pause. Paper rustled.
“Dominic may not know. If he does, he has not yet chosen to act.”
Dominic went rigid.
The recording continued.
“The person who ordered the accident was not Marcus Solin. Solin was the buyer, not the architect. The architect was someone who knew every family secret and had access to the trust.”
The tape crackled.
Then her father said a name.
“Edward Reeve.”
Dominic stared at the recorder as though the voice had struck him physically.
“My father,” he whispered.
Lena stopped the recording.
Neither of them spoke for a long moment.
Then Dominic stepped away, pressing his hands against his face.
“My father is dead,” he said finally. “He died three years ago.”
“Dead men can leave living accomplices.”
He looked at her.
“Or living sons who have been protecting their legacy.”
Lena held the recorder tightly.
She had spent eight years seeking the man who ordered her family’s deaths.
May you like
Now she had evidence that the answer might have been sitting at the head of Dominic’s family table all along.
And she could no longer be certain whether the man standing beside her was her ally—or the final piece of the same machine.
