Chapter 8 - The Escape From the Clinic|
The darkness lasted only seconds, but those seconds were enough for panic to take hold.
Someone shouted in the corridor. A door slammed. I heard glass breaking somewhere beyond the waiting room.
Roberto kept one arm around me, his other hand pressed against the wall as he searched for an exit.
“Stay behind me,” he whispered.
I almost obeyed automatically.
Then I remembered the four years I had spent being told what I needed without being asked what I wanted.
“I’m staying beside you,” I said. “Not behind you.”
He looked at me.
Even in the darkness, I saw the surprise in his eyes.
“Beside me, then.”
An officer led us through a service corridor toward the rear entrance. Daniel followed with Bianca, who had gone pale and silent. Outside, two police vehicles blocked the driveway. One officer opened the rear door of an armored transport.
We were halfway across the parking area when a man in a gray jacket stepped from behind a parked van.
He raised his hand.
“Roberto!”
The officers moved between us.
The man dropped to his knees.
“Please! I have information. They told me to scare her, not shoot anyone.”
“Who told you?” the officer demanded.
“Adrian Vale. He said if Bianca talked, we had to make sure she never reached a courtroom.”
Bianca stared at him.
“You said you were only watching the clinic.”
“I was,” the man replied desperately. “Then they changed the order.”
The officer handcuffed him.
Roberto looked at Bianca, his expression grim.
“Your brother is willing to kill you to protect himself.”
She began to cry again.
“I know.”
“No,” I said quietly. “You know now. There is a difference.”
We were taken to a secure police facility, where the investigators separated us for statements. I spent three hours answering questions about the company documents, my electronic signature, and the night Bianca appeared in my bedroom.
When I emerged, Roberto was waiting in a hallway with two paper cups of coffee.
“I didn’t know how much you hated it,” he said.
“Hated what?”
“The fear. The way people move when I enter a room. The way my employees never tell me when I’m wrong.”
I accepted the coffee.
“I didn’t hate your power. I hated what you used it to excuse.”
He looked down at his cup.
“I thought being feared would keep people from hurting those I loved.”
“Fear makes people hide things. It doesn’t make them loyal.”
“I understand that now.”
“Do you?”
He met my gaze.
“I’m going to turn over every document we have. Even the ones that could damage my family. I’ll cooperate with the investigators, and I’ll step away from the company until they finish.”
“That could cost you everything.”
“It should, if I built it on something rotten.”
I had expected anger, excuses, perhaps another attempt to persuade me to return home. I had not expected him to surrender the very thing he had spent his life protecting.
It did not repair our marriage.
But it was the first decision he had made that gave me reason to believe he might change.
A police detective approached us.
“We recovered a message from Adrian’s phone. It was sent to an unknown contact shortly before the clinic incident.”
She handed Roberto a printed copy.
The wife has the letter. Get it back before she reaches Geneva.
Roberto looked at me.
“They know about the letter.”
“No,” I replied. “They know about the letter my mother-in-law wanted me to find.”
I unfolded the note again and examined the handwriting.
For the first time, I noticed a tiny mark beside the final sentence: a small blue star.
My mother-in-law had used that symbol on every birthday card she had ever given me.
May you like
It meant there was more.
And somewhere, in Geneva, someone knew exactly what it was.
