Chapter 10 - They Came for the Boy
I reached the safe house in fourteen minutes.
The front door was open.
One guard was unconscious in the hallway.
The second had a broken wrist but was awake.
“Tessa’s son,” I demanded.
“Upstairs.”
I ran.
Eli was crouched inside a bedroom closet, gripping a baseball bat with both hands.
He looked terrified.
But alive.
Tessa dropped to her knees and pulled him into her arms.
Only one intruder had entered the house.
He fled when the alarm triggered.
Brendan’s men recovered something from the backyard.
A phone.
Disposable.
But not empty.
There was one photograph stored on it.
Graham Keane entering my mansion three nights earlier.
He had been inside the same night Tessa received the warning card.
Yet the security logs showed no record of Graham entering.
Someone had deleted them.
“Who still has that level of access?” I asked.
Brendan answered carefully.
“Me. You. And Graham.”
Because I had never revoked the permissions my father gave him.
My mistake.
Eli tugged my sleeve.
“Mr. Vincent?”
I crouched.
“What?”
“The man downstairs wasn’t looking for me.”
Everyone stopped.
“How do you know?”
“He kept asking where Mom hid the blue notebook.”
Tessa looked confused.
“What blue notebook?”
Eli ran to his backpack and pulled out a child’s spiral notebook covered in rockets.
“This?”
Inside were ordinary drawings.
Homework.
Baseball scores.
Then Tessa flipped to the middle.
A folded piece of paper fell out.
Her face changed.
“Nicholas wrote this.”
She remembered finding it years earlier inside his jacket.
She had used the notebook to preserve it because she was afraid it would disappear.
The paper contained numbers.
Not account numbers.
Dates and addresses.
Brendan entered one into his phone.
The first address belonged to an old warehouse owned by Graham’s firm.
The second belonged to a retired judge.
The third belonged to a federal storage facility.
Then we reached the last line.
81 Beacon Hill.
My mansion.
Beside it Nicholas had written:
The original file is still inside Dad’s house.
May you like
My house had belonged to my father before it belonged to me.
For nine years, the proof Nicholas died trying to protect had been hidden somewhere under my own roof.
