Chapter 5 - THE PRICE OF SILENCE
Nadia Starling kept apologizing while Theo pressed a clean kitchen towel against the cut on her cheek.
“I brought her back,” she said. “I knew something was wrong, and I brought her back.”
“Save your strength,” he told her. “You've been shot at.”
“The bullet missed me.”
“That's not the comforting detail you think it is.”
I stood by the broken window, staring at the quiet street. A neighbor had come outside with a dog and was examining the tire marks at the curb. Ordinary morning life continued within yards of the place where someone had just tried to kill us. It made the whole world feel dishonest.
Theo had seen a gray sedan leaving the street but hadn't caught its license plate. He called Ronan, who told him to stay with Nadia and not to let anyone from Vale security near the house.
Five minutes later, a second call came from an unfamiliar woman.
“This is Detective Naomi Reyes with the state investigations division. Mr. Vale gave me your number. Is anyone seriously hurt?”
Theo put the phone on speaker. “No, but someone's firing shots into occupied kitchens.”
“Have you reported it to local dispatch?”
“Not yet.”
“Do it now. I need an official incident record even if the local sheriff is a fool. Don't touch the bullet strike or clean the glass. I'm an hour away.”
Her voice was sharp but controlled, and I clung to it. An hour was a number. It was something I could count.
“Nadia says my sister is back at the Vale estate,” I told her.
“Do you know where?”
“No.”
“Then don't go looking on your own.”
I stared at the phone. “With respect, Detective, we've tried waiting for people to believe us.”
“I believe you enough to get in my car. Now help me by staying alive.”
She hung up before I could argue.
I wanted to obey her. I truly did. But then a new message appeared on my phone, accompanied by a photograph of Sofia's hand. The red hair tie I had found in the underground room was wrapped around her wrist. Written on the back of that hand were two words in black marker: EAST WING.
The caption read: ONE LAST CHANCE. COME BEFORE NOON.
I couldn't tell whether Sofia had written the words or someone had forced them on her. Either way, someone wanted me back inside the mansion.
Ronan arrived twenty minutes later, his black car throwing gravel as it stopped. He entered Nadia's kitchen without a coat. The first thing he did was look at the bullet hole. The second was turn to me.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Did they touch you?”
“No, Ronan.”
His shoulders loosened only slightly. “I'm sorry. I sent you here.”
“Stop apologizing for what other people choose to do.”
Nadia spoke from the table. “Mr. Vale, your company made my husband sign away his right to talk about what happened to him.”
Ronan faced her. She didn't stand.
“My father ran Westbank then,” he said. “I can't undo what he did. But if my company continued hurting people afterward, that's on me to uncover and put right.”
“You sound good saying that,” she replied. “Your father sounded good, too.”
He took the blow without defending himself.
Nadia finally nodded toward my phone. “The girl is in the east wing. I know a loading lift that reaches the old treatment rooms under the conservatory. It was used when the family had a private nurse. Someone could hide a person there without the regular staff knowing.”
Theo pulled up the estate plans. “Those rooms aren't on the modern floor plan.”
“That's why they're useful,” Nadia said.
Ronan studied the screen. “If the picture is genuine, she might be held there. But it's also exactly where they'd expect Elena to go.”
“Then you go with me,” I said.
“No,” he answered. “I walk in the front door and make Celeste think I've stopped looking for Sofia. Naomi can arrive with a team as soon as she has enough for an emergency search.”
“How long?”
“I don't know.”
Those three words were more frightening than a lie, because they were true.
We returned to the estate by separate routes. Theo took Nadia to a hospital with a copy of her statement and promised to meet Naomi there. Ronan drove through the main gate. I rode in the back of a florist's truck belonging to Iris, the gardener, who'd been hired by Mrs. Finch years earlier and had never liked Malcolm.
Iris was a broad-shouldered woman with a tattoo of a swallow on her forearm. She told me how to step around the deliveries once we reached the conservatory loading bay.
“Mrs. Finch told me you're Sofia's sister,” she said as she lifted a crate of chrysanthemums. “I met Sofia twice. She taught my boy how to repair the spine of a library book. He still talks about it.”
The kindness nearly made me cry. Instead I asked, “Why are you helping?”
“Because good people shouldn't have to disappear for asking where bad things are buried.”
She opened the loading door. I slipped inside with a bucket of cut stems and a borrowed cardigan over my uniform. For the first time, I moved through the house without pretending I belonged there. My only purpose was to find my sister.
At the far end of the corridor, voices carried from the breakfast room. I recognized Ronan's immediately.
“Where's Malcolm?” he asked.
Celeste replied, “Overseeing the gate repairs. I heard someone made a scene there.”
“It was an unpleasant morning.”
“And the maid?”
“Gone.”
“Good.”
There was a clink of porcelain. Then Celeste spoke so softly I almost missed it.
“You've always had a weakness for people who need rescuing, Ronan. It makes you predictable.”
His chair scraped. “What exactly are you accusing me of?”
“Nothing. I'm reminding you that you built a very large company by making difficult choices. Don't let one emotional week erase twenty years of work.”
I could picture her smile. I had learned to dread it.
Ronan's voice turned flat. “I haven't made a choice yet.”
“Then perhaps you should read the papers waiting in your office.”
Their footsteps faded. I hurried to the old service lift. The iron cage was hidden behind shelving crowded with gardening supplies. On the wall beside the controls, someone had painted the Vale crest over a much older mark. I rubbed at the flaking paint and uncovered three red strokes through an open circle.
The lift descended with a sickening groan. When it stopped, a hallway stretched before me, lit by fluorescent tubes that hummed like insects. The air smelled of antiseptic, the same sharp chemical odor that had followed me upstairs.
I found three small rooms. In the first stood empty metal cabinets. In the second, a hospital bed with the sheets stripped. In the third, a chair faced a blank wall. Tape hung from one armrest. A disposable coffee cup lay beside it, still damp inside.
I called Sofia's name once. Then again.
A dull tapping answered from somewhere beyond the wall.
Three taps. A pause. Three taps.
I pressed my ear to the plaster. “Sofia? It's me.”
The tapping stopped. For an instant I thought I'd imagined it. Then came one long scrape, followed by a whisper so faint I couldn't make out the words.
I looked around for a door. The wall joined a tall storage cabinet that seemed too deep for the room. I pulled at its side. It shifted on hidden wheels, revealing a narrow opening and another steel door, this one bolted from the outside.
“Elena?”
My sister's voice.
I went to my knees beside the door. “Sof? I'm here.”
“Don't open it.”
I froze. “What?”
“There's a camera. They said if you came in, they'd hurt you.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I'm alive.” She gave a shaky laugh that turned into a cough. “I missed you, Lena.”
“Don't say that like goodbye. I'm getting you out.”
A shadow crossed the floor behind me. I turned.
Celeste stood at the end of the corridor, holding a slim black pistol low at her side. Her face was composed. Only her eyes had changed; they no longer bothered to pretend I was an employee.
“Of course you came,” she said. “Love makes people so easy to steer.”
I rose slowly, putting myself between her and the hidden door.
“Let my sister go.”
“She'll be released when Mr. Vale signs what I need him to sign.”
“Then why bring me here?”
“Because he might be willing to lose a company for one frightened girl. Two frightened girls make the calculation easier.”
My heart pounded. “You killed Mara.”
For the first time, Celeste looked genuinely offended.
“Be careful what you claim to know.”
“You knew about her code. You knew about the river.”
“I knew many things about that family. Most of them terrible. And all of them profitable to the people willing to keep quiet.”
She held up a phone. On its screen was a live video of Ronan sitting at his desk. In front of him lay a thick document labeled IRREVOCABLE VOTING TRANSFER.
“His controlling shares,” Celeste said. “A signature, and you walk away with your sister. Refusal, and Mr. Pryce finds out how loud people can scream behind a locked door.”
She pressed the speaker button. Ronan's voice came through, low and furious.
“Celeste, this ends now.”
“Then sign.”
I saw him pick up a pen. I knew how much he wanted to keep us alive. And suddenly I understood the second trap: even if we escaped, she'd take everything he could use to fight her.
“Ronan!” I shouted toward the phone. “Don't do it!”
Celeste struck me hard across the face with the back of her free hand. I stumbled against the wall, tasting blood.
“Elena?” Ronan's voice broke through the speaker.
I forced myself upright. “She needs the company because the evidence is still in it. If you sign, she'll bury Westbank forever.”
Celeste aimed the pistol at the floor beside my feet. “Enough.”
From behind the steel door, Sofia began to pound on the metal.
Ronan's voice returned, suddenly calm. “I have a condition.”
Celeste hesitated. “What condition?”
“I sign in person, with both sisters alive where I can see them.”
She considered it. At last a small smile returned.
“Very well,” she said. “Come to the east wing. And Ronan? Don't make me regret trusting you.”
She ended the call.
I stared at her. “You think he trusts you?”
“No, Elena.” She moved closer, her voice almost gentle. “I think he still doesn't understand what his father left me.”
May you like
She opened the folder under her arm. Inside was a photograph of Mara's body being recovered from the river fifteen years ago. On the back, in a neat blue script, were four words:
THE BOAT WAS EMPTY.
