Chapter 10 - Unit 314
Unit 314 sat behind a chain-link gate at a storage complex near the river.
Detective Reed opened it while two federal agents stood nearby.
The unit looked disappointingly ordinary.
Boxes.
Old office chairs.
A broken copier.
Then Reed found the false wall.
Behind it were seven banker’s boxes, each numbered by year.
Elaine had kept everything.
Original invoices.
Board minutes.
Voice recordings.
Handwritten notes from Grandpa.
One folder carried my name.
ETHAN—DO NOT FILE.
Inside was a bank application opened on my eighteenth birthday.
The account belonged to a Caribbean holding company.
I had supposedly authorized it.
I had supposedly received millions in consulting payments.
I had never seen it in my life.
My father had been building a scapegoat for nineteen years.
Me.
If his fraud was ever exposed, the records would point to his son.
The realization hurt in a place anger couldn’t reach.
Nora had once asked why Dad always insisted I sign company documents without reading them.
“Routine paperwork,” he called it.
Routine paperwork that trained everyone to accept my signature on anything.
Maya found another file.
It contained Grandpa’s private notes about Madison.
She is reckless, but not cruel by nature. George has taught her that rescue is love and consequences are betrayal.
I read it twice.
Grandpa had seen all of us clearly.
Avery.
Nora.
Madison.
Me.
Maybe that was why Dad hated him at the end.
A phone rang from inside one of the boxes.
Everyone froze.
Reed dug beneath folders and found a cheap prepaid phone.
It was ringing now.
She put it on speaker.
Caleb Shaw spoke first.
“I assume you found Elaine’s little museum.”
“Where is she?” Reed asked.
“Alive.”
“For now?”
“For as long as Ethan cooperates.”
I stepped closer.
“What do you want?”
“You.”
“Why?”
“Because your father was careless, Julian was unstable, and your sister was stupid. I am none of those things.”
My pulse hammered.
“You built this.”
“I protected a machine that made all of you rich.”
“You mean you stole from it.”
“I mean I kept Arthur from burning the family to the ground over principles.”
He sent an address.
A private marina forty miles north.
May you like
Then he added one instruction.
“Come before sunset, Ethan. Or Elaine goes into the river with the rest of your grandfather’s secrets.”
