Chapter 16 - The Handwriting on the Wall
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Damon’s body went rigid beside me as my words registered. Without waiting for the charity auction to conclude, he had his security team escort us out through the Plaza’s underground garage and straight back to the Upper East Side mansion inside an armored Maybach.
By eleven o'clock that night, the estate was on complete lockdown. Twelve armed guards patrolled the perimeter iron gates while Evelyn took an exhausted Sophie upstairs to sleep in her own reinforced suite.
Damon and I went straight into his late father’s oak-paneled library on the first floor—a room that had remained largely untouched since Richard Vance’s assassination four years ago.
"Tell me everything you remember about that night in my penthouse study, Elena," Damon said urgently, unlocking a hidden steel vault behind the mahogany bookshelves. "The police swept my father’s office after the bombing, and my private phone servers were wiped clean by an outside hacker twenty minutes after the explosion on the bridge."
"I was studying for my organic chemistry midterm at your desk around two in the morning," I explained, pacing across the Persian rug as the memory sharpened in my mind. "Your father had forwarded his private line to your penthouse earlier that week because he thought his office at the port was bugged. The answering machine clicked on aloud before I could mute it. A man’s voice—raspy, furious, with that exact Northeast clip Kensington used on the stairs tonight—said: 'Richard, if you hand those Queensboro container manifests to the federal prosecutor tomorrow morning, you won't live to reach Manhattan. Stay out of my business, you arrogant bastard.'"
Damon pulled three heavy leather-bound ledgers from the back of the vault and slammed them onto the mahogany desk.
"The Queensboro container manifests," Damon breathed, flipping rapidly through the yellowed shipping logs from four years ago. "My father told me the day before he died that someone was using Vance cargo ships to smuggle military-grade weapons out of the Brooklyn docks under diplomatic immunity. Only a sitting United States Senator on the Foreign Relations and Harbor committees had the clearance codes to bypass customs inspections."
I leaned over the desk beside him as a loose sheet of heavy ivory cardstock slipped from the back cover of the final ledger and fluttered onto the carpet.
My heart stopped. I bent down and picked it up.
It was a handwritten cease-and-desist threat addressed to Richard Vance four years ago, written on the exact same cream cotton paper with the same distinctive watermark as the sniper threat slid under my NYU dorm door. And scrawled across the bottom corner in faded fountain pen were the initials A.K.
May you like
"Damon, look at the watermark," I whispered, holding the two notes side by side under the desk lamp. "It’s identical. Kensington didn't just kill your father—he was the one watching us four years ago."
Suddenly, the crystal chandelier above our heads flickered twice and died, plunging the entire mansion into pitch darkness as the backup generator failed outside.
