Chapter 4 - THE TRAITOR IN THE HOUSE
Darkness swallowed the mansion.
A second later, gunfire shattered the windows.
Victor hit Clara hard around the waist.
They dropped behind the stone fireplace as glass sprayed across the floor.
“Stay down.”
“I gathered that.”
Another burst tore through the room.
Victor drew a handgun.
Clara hated how natural the weapon looked in his hand.
Roman shouted from the hallway.
“West lawn! Three shooters!”
Emergency lights flickered red.
Victor leaned around the fireplace and fired twice.
A distant scream followed.
Clara flinched.
Victor looked at her.
“Can you run?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He grabbed her hand.
This time Clara did not complain.
They ran.
Men flooded through corridors.
Some rushed toward the gunfire. Others formed a moving shield around Victor and Clara.
At the basement stairs, Roman suddenly collapsed.
Blood spread across his white shirt.
Clara stopped.
Victor pulled her.
“No.”
“He’s been hit.”
“We have people.”
“You have gunmen. I’m a surgeon.”
She dropped beside Roman.
Entry wound beneath the clavicle.
No exit.
His breathing was wet.
“Chest seal. Now.”
Nobody moved.
Clara snapped her fingers.
“Unless one of you wants to explain to him in the afterlife why you stood around looking expensive, bring me the medical kit.”
Three men moved at once.
Victor stared at her.
Even under gunfire, she was different.
The exhausted woman from the Narrows disappeared when blood appeared.
In her place was a physician with absolute command.
Clara inserted a needle into Roman’s chest.
Air hissed out.
Roman gasped.
“Congratulations,” Clara muttered. “You’re not dying yet.”
He managed a weak smile.
“Comforting bedside manner.”
Victor’s radio crackled.
“Mr. Kaine, shooters neutralized. One alive.”
Victor’s face became ice.
“Bring him downstairs.”
Twenty minutes later, Roman was stable.
Clara emerged from the makeshift medical room and found Victor waiting.
Blood covered one cuff.
Not his.
“You should rest.”
“So should you.”
“I’ve been trying for fifteen years.”
Clara looked toward the basement door.
“You’re going to hurt him.”
Victor did not pretend otherwise.
“He tried to kill you.”
“He tried to kill you.”
“He fired into a room where you were standing.”
“And that makes it personal?”
“Yes.”
The simplicity of the answer disturbed her more than anger would have.
Clara stepped closer.
“I don’t want someone tortured because of me.”
Victor’s jaw tightened.
“This world doesn’t operate according to what you want.”
“Then maybe that’s the problem with your world.”
For a moment, the old Victor appeared—the man everyone feared.
Then something unexpected happened.
He handed his gun to a guard.
“No torture.”
The guard blinked.
Victor repeated it.
“Question him. No torture.”
Clara stared.
“You’re changing your rules because I asked?”
“No.”
“You just did.”
Victor walked away.
Clara almost smiled.
Almost.
The captured shooter talked anyway.
Fear did what violence did not need to.
His name was Luis Ortega.
He had been paid through Marcus Vale.
But Vale was not the architect.
He was merely a door.
The real name came forty minutes later.
Elias Kane.
Clara thought she had misheard.
“Kane?”
Victor stood across the basement interrogation room.
“K-A-N-E.”
“That’s practically your name.”
Victor’s expression was grim.
“That’s intentional.”
Elias Kane had once been Elias Kaine.
Victor’s uncle.
His father’s younger brother.
The family had believed Elias dead for thirteen years.
A warehouse explosion.
No body recovered.
Victor explained the history upstairs.
“My father and Elias built the organization together. Elias wanted narcotics. Human trafficking. Anything profitable.”
“And your father?”
“Was still a criminal. Just one with lines he refused to cross.”
“Comforting distinction.”
“I didn’t say he was good.”
Victor poured water.
“My father forced Elias out. Three months later, my mother was killed.”
Clara remembered Victor saying his mother was dead.
“Elias?”
“We suspected him. Never proved it.”
“And now he’s alive.”
“Yes.”
“Why come back?”
“To take everything.”
Clara thought of her father.
“Was Elias responsible for Nathan?”
Victor did not answer quickly enough.
“Victor.”
“Yes.”
The word landed like a blade.
“He ordered the men who killed your father.”
Clara’s eyes filled.
Victor continued before she could speak.
“I learned that six years ago.”
“And still didn’t tell me.”
“I killed the two men who forced his car off the road.”
Clara stared at him.
“You thought that fixed it?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“Because I was angry.”
For once, he sounded ashamed.
Clara turned away.
Her father’s death.
Her destroyed career.
Daniel Price.
The ambush.
All roads were beginning to converge.
“Marcus Vale worked for Elias.”
“We believe so.”
“Then Daniel Price knew something.”
Victor nodded.
“And Elias had him killed on my operating table.”
“Yes.”
Clara looked down at her hands.
The hands she had hated.
The hands she had blamed.
“They made me the murder weapon.”
Victor came closer.
“No.”
She looked up.
“They tried.”
That distinction mattered.
More than she wanted it to.
At 2:10 a.m., Roman regained consciousness.
His first request was whiskey.
Clara refused.
His second was to speak privately with Victor.
Ten minutes later, Victor found Clara in the kitchen.
“There’s something you need to see.”
Roman had remembered a detail from the shooting.
Before the lights failed, someone had overridden the mansion’s security system from inside.
Only six people had access.
One was Victor.
One was Roman.
One was Victor’s chief financial officer.
And one was Victor’s godfather.
Samuel Grayson.
Clara recognized the name.
“Why?”
Victor handed her an old photograph.
Nathan Hayes stood outside St. Jude’s.
Beside him was Marcus Vale.
And beside Vale—
Samuel Grayson.
Clara stared.
“My father knew him.”
Victor nodded.
“Apparently better than either of us knew.”
Roman entered slowly, one arm in a sling.
“Found something else.”
He placed a sealed envelope on the table.
It had been recovered from a safe deposit box registered to Nathan Hayes.
The envelope was yellow with age.
Across the front, in handwriting Clara had not seen since she was seventeen, were six words:
For Clara, if Victor finds you.
Clara’s knees nearly buckled.
She tore it open.
Inside was a letter.
And a small brass key.
She read the first sentence.
Then she stopped.
Victor saw the blood leave her face.
“What does it say?”
May you like
Clara lifted her eyes.
“My father knew you would come back.”
