Chapter 3 - THE WEDDING DATE
Rachel stared at her own name until the letters stopped looking real.
March 28.
Her wedding day.
Below the date was a code.
CLOSED.
She pushed the laptop away.
“No.”
Nicholas stayed perfectly still.
Daniel did not.
He immediately reached for his phone.
“I’m moving security to this floor.”
Rachel shook her head.
“You think someone plans to kill me?”
“I think,” Nicholas said, “someone made a schedule.”
The room suddenly felt smaller.
Rachel remembered Evan insisting on choosing the venue.
Evan insisting on a private estate outside the city.
Evan insisting they leave immediately afterward for a honeymoon in Belize.
At the time, she thought it was controlling.
Now it looked operational.
She climbed out of bed.
Pain shot through her feet.
Nicholas caught her arm.
“Where are you going?”
“To Meridian.”
“No.”
Rachel glared at him.
“My files are there.”
“And so is the man who may have put your name on a death list.”
“That’s why I need proof.”
Nicholas studied her for several seconds.
“You always argue like this?”
“Only when strange men kidnap me into penthouses.”
“I rescued you.”
“You brought me somewhere without asking.”
“You were unconscious.”
“That does not improve your argument.”
For the first time, something almost resembling amusement touched Nicholas’s face.
Then it vanished.
“We go together.”
Meridian Ledger Partners occupied three floors of a steel-and-glass tower downtown.
By 9:15 a.m., Rachel entered through the underground garage wearing borrowed boots and one of Nicholas’s security team following twenty feet behind.
Nicholas stayed beside her.
Charles Mercer met them near the elevators.
He was sixty, silver-haired, charming, and usually impossible to surprise.
Today, he looked terrified.
“Rachel.”
His eyes shifted to Nicholas.
“Mr. Valenti.”
Rachel held up her phone.
“Why does Evan have Meridian files?”
Mercer’s face collapsed.
He closed his office door.
“You weren’t supposed to find out this way.”
Rachel felt sick.
“Find out what?”
Mercer opened his desk safe.
Inside were paper ledgers.
Old ones.
He removed one and slid it toward her.
“You were hired seven years ago because of your father.”
Rachel stared at him.
“My father died when I was fourteen.”
Mercer nodded.
“I know.”
Nicholas opened the ledger.
The first page carried a name.
THOMAS BENNETT.
Rachel’s father.
Underneath it:
CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATOR - VALENTI ORGANIZATION.
Rachel looked at Nicholas.
He had gone completely still.
Mercer swallowed.
“Your father didn’t die in a highway accident, Rachel.”
Rachel could barely speak.
“What are you saying?”
Mercer looked toward the closed office door.
May you like
Then whispered the secret he had protected for seventeen years.
“Thomas Bennett was murdered because he found the same accounts you just found.”
