Chapter 9 - The Ghost of Six Months Ago
The voice over the megaphone crackled with sickening amusement.
"Don't make this messy, big brother!" Adrien shouted through the storm.
"You're out of ammunition, you're bleeding to death, and I have ten men with
automatic rifles pointing at every exit!"
Inside the shattered living room, the rain was deafening.
Wind whipped through the broken glass, tearing at my hair.
Victor lay against the base of the concrete pillar.
His face was pale, slick with cold sweat and rain.
My hands were pressed against the gunshot wound in his shoulder, but the blood
kept flowing between my fingers.
"The pantry," Victor whispered, his voice dangerously weak.
"Go, Lena. The boat slip."
"I’m not leaving you to die," I hissed through my teeth.
I tore the bottom hem of my ruined silk dress, wrapping the fabric tightly
around his shoulder to stem the bleeding.
"You spent four years carrying Claire’s ghost. You’re not dying on this floor
for me."
Victor’s dark eyes locked onto mine.
Even bleeding out, the sheer intensity in his gaze made my breath catch.
"You aren't Claire," he murmured, his scarred hand reaching up to touch my
cheek.
"Claire was innocent. You... you're a fighter."
"Then help me fight," I said.
Outside, the headlights blazed through the shattered window, blinding us.
"Lena!" Adrien’s voice boomed again.
"I know he told you his fairy tales! He told you I’m the bad guy, didn't he? He
told you I killed Claire!"
Adrien laughed.
The sound was distorted, echoing off the wet cliffs.
"Ask him about the night the judge died, Lena! Ask him why he won't look at the
hard drive!"
My hands froze on Victor’s bandage.
I looked down at him.
Victor’s eyes hardened, but there was a flicker of genuine torment in his
expression.
"What is he talking about?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
"He’s playing mind games," Victor rasped.
"He wants you to hesitate."
"Lena!" Adrien shouted from the gravel drive.
"The traffic camera at your studio didn't just record the crash! It recorded
what happened two minutes after the crash! Why don't you plug the drive into
Victor’s terminal and see who pulled the judge out of the car?!"
The black hard drive sat on the floor two feet from us, safe inside its
shockproof casing.
Beside the concrete pillar was Victor’s encrypted tactical workstation, running
on independent battery backup.
Victor reached out, grabbing my wrist with surprising strength.
"Don't do it, Lena."
"Why?" I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"If Adrien was the driver, what is on this footage that scares you?"
"Because the truth won't change anything," Victor whispered, pain lacing his
voice.
"It will only break you."
I pulled my wrist from his grasp.
I grabbed the hard drive and crawled to the workstation.
I slammed the drive into the USB port and entered the encryption key Victor had
given me earlier.
The screen flared to life.
Dozens of camera feeds organized by date and timestamp appeared.
I scrolled back exactly six months.
October 14th.
11:42 PM.
The camera feed from my studio's exterior was crystal clear.
Rain poured down on Milwaukee Avenue.
At 11:43 PM, the silver Maserati blew through the red light at eighty miles an
hour, T-boning the judge’s Mercedes sedan.
The impact was catastrophic.
Metal crumpled like paper.
The driver’s door of the Maserati flew open.
A man stumbled out into the rain, clutching his lower back in agony.
Adrien.
His face was clearly visible under the streetlamp.
Blood dripped from his forehead.
Victor was telling the truth, I thought, a wave of relief washing over me.
Adrien was the driver.
Then the footage continued.
Adrien didn't run away.
He staggered to the driver's side of the crushed Mercedes.
The federal judge was trapped behind the steering wheel, unconscious and
bleeding heavily.
Adrien reached into the crushed vehicle.
He didn't check for a pulse.
He pulled a thick manila envelope from the judge’s briefcase.
Inside the envelope were dozens of surveillance photographs.
Photographs of me.
My breath seized in my throat.
I leaned closer to the high-resolution screen.
The photographs were taken outside my apartment, outside my studio, inside my
yoga classes.
Dated eight months ago.
Nine months ago.
Long before I ever met Adrien.
And at the bottom of the surveillance file, stamped with a federal seal, was my
real birth certificate.
My birth name wasn't Lena Moore.
My mother had changed my last name when I was five years old to protect me after
my father vanished.
My father was Marcus Vance.
The former chief financial officer of Duca Maritime.
The man who had stolen forty million dollars from Antonio Duca fifteen years ago
before disappearing off the face of the earth.
A cold chill washed over my entire body.
I looked back at Victor.
"My father didn't abandon me," I whispered, the realization hitting me like a
physical blow.
"Antonio killed him, didn't he?"
Victor didn't look away.
He closed his eyes, his breathing shallow.
"Yes," Victor said, his voice cracking with shame.
"Fifteen years ago. On my father’s orders."
"And Adrien didn't hit the judge by accident," I continued, tears streaming down
my face.
"The judge had reopened the cold case on my father's disappearance. The judge
had found me."
"Adrien was sent to intercept the judge's file before the feds could place you
in witness protection," Victor said.
He looked at me, his eyes filled with raw, unvarnished agony.
"My family hunted you for fifteen years, Lena. Not because of forty million
dollars. But because your father left a ledger that can send Antonio, Adrien,
and the entire Duca empire to prison for life."
Outside, the front doors of the safehouse blew inward with a thunderous blast of
C4 explosives.
Adrien stepped through the smoke, a gold-plated semi-automatic pistol in his
May you like
hand, smiling like the devil himself.
"Reunion time, cara mia," Adrien sneered.
