Chapter 7 - A Shadow from the Past and the Blackwood Corporate Ambush
The following morning brought the harsh realities of corporate warfare crashing down upon our newfound sanctuary.
I was in the private conservatory reviewing archival documents for a restoration project when my phone rang. It was an encrypted call.
"Miss Santos," a frantic voice came through the line. It was Patricia Monroe. "You need to come to the gallery storage depot immediately. Someone broke into the private vault where your father’s archived estate records were stored."
My stomach dropped. "What? What was taken?"
"They bypassed the security cameras and targeted one specific trunk," Patricia said, her voice shaking. "The trunk containing your father’s original corporate design commissions from 2016."
Within twenty minutes, Sebastian and I arrived at the downtown gallery storage facility under heavy security escort.
The vault door had been professionally bypassed with a military-grade electronic decoder. Inside, the metal trunk belonging to my late father had been pried open, papers scattered across the concrete floor.
"Why would anyone steal my father's old painting drafts?" I asked, kneeling on the floor, gathering the scattered charcoal sketches.
Sebastian picked up a singed manila folder that had fallen beneath a metal shelf. His face instantly darkened into a mask of pure fury.
"Because your father didn't just paint art, Maria," Sebastian said, his voice deadly quiet. "In 2016, before Blackwood Enterprises went public, my father hired David Santos to verify the provenance of a rare maritime artifact collection that was being used as collateral for our international shipping merger."
Sebastian opened the folder. Inside were copies of notarized shipping manifests bearing the signature of Arthur Blackwood.
"Arthur didn't just stage the car accident that killed my parents," Sebastian realized, his fists clenching until his knuckles turned bone-white. "Your father discovered that Arthur was smuggling black-market antiquities through our cargo fleet. Arthur set the fire at the youth center eight years ago not just to kill me, but to destroy the evidence your father held."
"My father knew?" I gasped, horror washing over me. "He knew Arthur was behind it all?"
"Your father kept the duplicate records hidden here," Sebastian said, looking at the empty locking mechanism. "Arthur realized that with you by my side, we would eventually connect the dots. He sent someone to steal the originals before we could present them to the federal prosecutor."
"There's something else," I said suddenly, remembering my father's old habits. I reached into the lining of the trunk's false bottom and pulled out a small, magnetic micro-SD card disguised as a brass rivet. "My father was an archivist. He never kept paper records without creating high-resolution digital backups."
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Sebastian stared at the micro-SD card in my palm, a dangerous, triumphant smile spreading across his face.
"Arthur just made his fatal mistake," Sebastian said. "With this, we don't just win the corporate proxy vote next week. We put Arthur Blackwood in federal prison for the rest of his life."
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