Chapter 14 - The Broker's Daughter
Grace heard boots rushing toward Leo's room. Vincent broke the window with a steel chair and looked down at the service roof twelve feet below. He lowered Leo through the opening to Marco's team while Grace tied sheets into a line and secured it to the bedframe.
“After you,” Vincent said.
“You first. You're heavier.”
They escaped as guards forced the door. Grace slid down the sheets, her injured shoulder screaming, and hit the roof rolling. Vincent followed, landing hard enough to crack a tile. The three of them squeezed into a laundry truck and drove out beneath a mountain of clean towels.
Only when the highway swallowed them did Leo explain. Vanessa was Harold Whitmore's niece, raised around the trafficking ring. She'd spent years arranging forged identities, blackmail payments, and disappearances. Richard Vale supplied money and clients, but Vanessa controlled the records. In their encrypted messages, she signed her orders THE BROKER.
“Why marry Vincent?” Grace asked.
“To get access to Salvatore's private archives. Your old family records were the last pieces she couldn't destroy.”
Vincent stared ahead. “She used our engagement to walk into every locked room I owned.”
“And the ten million?”
“A bonus for whoever made your death look accidental.” Leo's voice shook. “She believed you had your mother's memory of the ledger's hiding place.”
Grace opened the paper with the bird sketch. A memory surfaced: Daniel sitting beside her bed after nightmares, winding the little blue music box. He always tapped the bird's broken wing three times before opening it.
“It's not a keyhole,” she whispered. “It's a latch.”
They drove to the hospital where Grace had spent seven months recovering. The storage office kept unclaimed personal items for a limited time; her box was long gone. But an old nurse remembered a man arriving to collect the blue bird on the day Grace was discharged.
“A man with a cane,” the nurse said. “He had a scar under one eye.”
Grace knew exactly who that was. Vincent did too.
“Harold Whitmore,” they said together.
Then Grace's phone rang from an unknown number. A woman's voice whispered, “Little Bird, don't go near Harold. He knows where I've been kept.”
May you like
“Mom?” Grace breathed.
“Listen carefully,” Clara said. “I'm alive. And I don't have much time.”
