Chapter 2 - THE MAN AT MY FATHER’S RIGHT HAND
Agent Reyes moved before Julian Mercer finished raising the pistol.
He pulled me sideways behind the row of lockers.
The first shot struck metal where my chest had been less than a second earlier.
The impact rang through the corridor.
A woman screamed in the main station.
Reyes drew his weapon and fired once.
Julian disappeared behind the wall.
“Stay down,” Reyes ordered.
My body protested as I crouched behind the lockers.
Every injury from Blackthorn Manor burned at once.
Another shot hit the edge of the metal cabinet.
Reyes leaned out, fired twice, then pulled back.
“Federal agent!” he shouted.
“Drop the weapon!”
Julian laughed softly from the other side of the corridor.
“You are protecting someone you do not understand.”
Reyes checked his ammunition.
“I hear that a lot.”
I tightened my grip around my mother’s letter.
Julian Mercer had known me since I was a child.
He attended every birthday dinner after my mother died.
He taught me how to sail.
He sat in the front row at my wedding.
When Nathan placed the ring on my finger, Julian had smiled.
Now he was trying to kill me.
“Victoria,” Julian called.
His voice was almost gentle.
“Your mother made the same mistake you are making.”
“What mistake?”
“She believed information could defeat power.”
A shadow moved across the floor.
Reyes fired toward it.
Julian returned two shots.
One shattered the overhead light.
The corridor fell into partial darkness.
“Your father built Vale Dominion to control men like Nathan,” Julian continued.
“But control is never clean.”
“Where is my mother?”
The question tore out of me.
Silence followed.
Then Julian spoke.
“Alive, the last time I saw her.”
My heart hammered.
“When?”
“Long after your father buried an empty coffin.”
Reyes glanced at me.
He had heard enough to understand that this was larger than a domestic violence case or a corporate fraud investigation.
A siren sounded outside the station.
Julian stepped backward toward the service exit.
Reyes moved after him.
I caught the agent’s sleeve.
“He wants you to follow.”
Reyes stopped.
A second later, an explosive charge detonated near the corridor entrance.
The blast knocked dust from the ceiling.
Emergency alarms erupted throughout the building.
By the time transit police reached us, Julian was gone.
Security footage showed him entering the station wearing a baseball cap and maintenance jacket.
Every camera covering the service exit had gone dark three minutes before the shooting.
Vale Dominion work.
Professional.
Prepared.
Agent Reyes placed the memory card and my mother’s note inside separate evidence bags.
“I need to take these.”
“No.”
“Victoria, someone just tried to kill you over them.”
“That is exactly why I am not handing them to a system my father’s company may have compromised.”
“I am the system.”
“And Julian knew where you were.”
Reyes had no answer.
We returned to the unmarked sedan through an underground parking entrance.
I expected my father to call.
He did not.
That worried me more.
Ten minutes later, Reyes’s phone rang.
He looked at the screen.
“Elias.”
“Put him on speaker.”
Reyes answered.
“Where is she?”
My father’s voice held no panic.
Only command.
“With me.”
“You took her to Union Station.”
It was not a question.
My stomach tightened.
“How did you know?” Reyes asked.
“My people recovered traffic footage.”
“Your people were fast.”
“They are always fast.”
I looked through the dark window.
“Did Julian Mercer tell you?”
Silence.
A dangerous silence.
My father spoke carefully.
“Why are you asking about Julian?”
“Because he just tried to kill me.”
The line went dead quiet.
For the first time in my life, I heard my father lose control of his breathing.
“Are you injured?”
“No.”
“Where is Mercer?”
“Gone.”
“What did he want?”
I unfolded the copy of my mother’s note I had photographed before Reyes sealed the original.
“He wanted the letter Eleanor left for me.”
My father did not respond.
Not to my mother’s name.
Not to the claim that she was alive.
Nothing.
That silence told me more than a confession.
“You knew,” I said.
“Victoria—”
“You knew she survived.”
“Come to Vale Dominion.”
“No.”
“I can explain.”
“You have had eighteen years to explain.”
“Not on an unsecured line.”
I laughed once.
It sounded bitter even to me.
“You own the company that secures half the world’s financial communications, and suddenly no line is safe?”
“Julian built parts of our internal network.”
“So he really is the man at your right hand.”
“He was.”
“Mother warned me not to trust him.”
My father inhaled sharply.
“Where did you find that warning?”
“Inside the handbag you gave me.”
Another silence.
This one was different.
He had not known.
“Do not return to Blackthorn Manor,” he said.
“I had not planned to.”
“Do not go to your apartment.”
“Nathan sold it without my knowledge.”
Elias’s voice hardened.
“I will send a secure team.”
“No.”
“You are being hunted.”
“I have been hunted inside my own marriage for four years.”
“That is not the same.”
“You’re right.”
I looked at the bruised reflection in the window.
“Nathan did not pretend he was protecting me.”
My father absorbed the accusation.
When he spoke again, his voice was lower.
“Julian cannot know what was on the memory card.”
“Why?”
“Because if Eleanor recorded what I believe she recorded, the Meridian Circle will kill everyone connected to it.”
“Then tell me what the Meridian Circle is.”
“A network.”
“You built a network.”
“This one existed before Vale Dominion.”
“What does it control?”
“Banks.”
“Governments?”
“Yes.”
“Judges?”
“Yes.”
“Ashford Global?”
A pause.
“Yes.”
My fingers tightened around the phone.
“How long did you know Nathan was connected to them?”
“Victoria.”
“How long?”
“Three years.”
The answer hollowed out the space inside me.
Three years.
My father had known Nathan’s company was connected to an international criminal network.
Three years during which Nathan isolated me.
Three years during which the first shove became a fall down the stairs.
Three years during which Celeste entered our lives.
“You knew,” I whispered.
“I knew his company was being used.”
“And you left me in his house.”
“I had surveillance around you.”
I almost could not speak.
“You had surveillance?”
“You were never unprotected.”
I looked at the bandages beneath my damaged dress.
“Two hundred lashes say otherwise.”
My father said my name.
I ended the call.
Reyes drove in silence for several minutes.
Then he asked the question I had been avoiding.
“Do you want to know what is on the memory card?”
“Yes.”
He changed direction.
“Where are we going?”
“To someone who can read it without alerting Vale Dominion.”
“Who?”
“A former financial crimes analyst.”
“Can we trust them?”
Reyes looked at me in the mirror.
“No.”
The answer was honest.
That was enough.
We arrived at a narrow brick building on the South Side just before dawn.
A woman opened the door before we knocked.
She was tall, Black, perhaps forty, with short natural hair and a scar crossing one eyebrow.
She looked at Reyes.
Then at me.
Finally, her gaze dropped to the evidence bag holding the memory card.
“You found Eleanor’s dead drop,” she said.
I stepped forward.
“You knew my mother?”
The woman opened the door wider.
“My name is Mara Quinn.”
May you like
She looked beyond us, checking the empty street.
“And your mother hired me to prove Elias Vale was lying to you.”
