Chapter 8 - The Voice
I did not tell Adrian.
Not immediately.
The SUV escaped through a service exit while Victor’s security team forced the motorcycles to break away.
Nobody was injured.
That felt like luck.
I no longer trusted luck.
At Grand Central, we entered through a private loading corridor.
Cassandra pressed her finger to a biometric panel beside a narrow bank of lockers.
Locker 214 clicked open.
Inside was a black flash drive and a paper envelope.
Nothing else.
Adrian took the drive.
I took the envelope.
Inside was a photograph of Victor Cole shaking hands with Charles Vale, Cassandra’s father, outside a courthouse.
The date printed on the back was eleven years earlier.
The same year my brother Michael died.
My pulse jumped.
“Why is my brother’s death connected to them?”
Cassandra frowned.
“What?”
I showed her the date.
She went pale.
Adrian noticed.
“You know something.”
“No.”
“You reacted.”
“Because my father almost went to prison that year.”
“For what?”
“Evidence tampering.”
I stared at her.
Victor had never mentioned that.
Neither had Adrian.
Cassandra looked at the drive.
“Open it somewhere offline.”
We moved to a security office beneath the terminal.
An officer brought in a clean laptop with no network connection.
Adrian inserted the drive.
There were six folders.
TRUST.
LAB.
VALE.
COLE.
HART.
And one labeled MICHAEL.
My hands started shaking.
Adrian looked at me.
“We can stop.”
“No.”
I opened MICHAEL.
There were police reports.
Insurance documents.
Photographs from the crash that killed my brother.
And a scan of a handwritten letter.
I recognized Michael’s handwriting immediately.
Victor—
If anything happens to me, you need to know Charles has been falsifying genetic records for private clients. He says it’s harmless because rich families pay to make problems disappear. It is not harmless. I copied everything.
He had told me he was leaving his job because the people there were “dirty.”
I read the next paragraph.
Emily.
I stopped.
Adrian looked at me.
“I don’t know.”
Michael’s funeral.
The cheap silver music box he had given me on my birthday two days before he died.
“I think I know.”
My phone buzzed again.
My mother.
Standing outside her house in Connecticut.
Taken ten minutes earlier.
May you like
Beneath it:
YOU HAVE ONE HOUR.
