Chapter 9 - THE PERSON NO ONE SUSPECTED
Arthur collapsed before Dominic could reach him. Madeleine dropped beside him, pressing a clean cloth against the wound while Leo swept the stairwell. The injury looked serious but not immediately fatal. Arthur was conscious, furious, and trying to push himself upright.
“Stay still,” Madeleine ordered.
“I have been shot in my own house before.”
“And you survived because someone treated you. Let me do my job.”
Arthur’s eyes flicked to her, then closed in reluctant surrender.
The applause came again from the upper landing. A figure stepped into view, hands raised, face calm. It was Elias Voss.
Dominic’s expression sharpened. “You ran.”
“I was told to disappear,” Voss replied. “I was never told the plan would end with me dead. When Mrs. Bell was killed, I understood I was disposable.”
“Who told you to disappear?” Leo demanded.
Voss looked at Arthur, then at Dominic. “Vincent arranged the money. But he wasn’t the architect. He was a useful man with an old grievance. Someone else gave him the idea that Dominic’s illness could be used to break Arthur.”
“Name them,” Dominic said.
Voss hesitated. That hesitation told Madeleine the person he feared was more dangerous than the armed men in the room.
Before he could speak, the lights went out.
Leo shouted for everyone to get down. A gunshot cracked through the dark. When the emergency lights flickered on, Voss was on the floor, bleeding from the shoulder, and the upper landing was empty. Someone had used the darkness to escape.
Madeleine checked Voss’s wound while Dominic helped his father sit against the wall. Arthur’s face was white with pain, but his gaze never left his son.
“You should have stayed away,” he said.
“You would have done the same for me.”
“Yes,” Arthur admitted. “That’s why I wanted you to stay away.”
The honesty between them was more painful than their arguments. Arthur finally confessed that he had spent years teaching Dominic to trust no one, then wondered why his son had learned to hide every weakness. He had mistaken fear for loyalty and obedience for love.
Dominic did not forgive him immediately. “You don’t get to repair twenty years in one conversation.”
“I know.”
“But you can start by telling me everything.”
Arthur nodded.
Voss survived the shooting and gave a statement to federal investigators, but his account was incomplete. Vincent had paid him to move money, yet a separate set of payments had come from an account that predated the current conflict. The funds were tied to a dormant trust established after Dominic’s mother died.
Madeleine noticed the name on the paperwork: Elena Russo.
Dominic’s mother had died when he was a teenager. Arthur had always said her death was an accident, and Dominic had never questioned him. But the trust had been activated six months earlier, shortly before the first attack.
“Who had access to this?” Madeleine asked.
Arthur looked at the document and seemed to age ten years. “Only three people. Me. Vincent. And Elena’s attorney.”
“Is the attorney alive?” Leo asked.
Arthur’s silence answered before he did.
“No. He died last month.”
Dominic stared at the trust records. The pillow attack, the payments, the security breach, and the attempt to manipulate both sides of the family had begun before Vincent moved the money. Someone had been preparing for this long before the drive-by.
Madeleine took Dominic’s hand. This time, he held on without pretending he was unaffected.
“We’ll find them,” she said.
He looked at the name of his dead mother, then at the sealed folder beneath it.
“Not until we know what my mother left behind.”
Inside the folder was a photograph of Elena Russo standing beside a man none of them recognized.
May you like
On the back, in her handwriting, were five words:
HE IS THE ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS.
