Chapter 13 - THE DEAD MAN WHO KNEW THE FINAL SECRET
Thomas Sloane was alive.
Barely.
He had survived the balcony fall nineteen years earlier.
Victor had hidden him inside a private rehabilitation facility under another name.
Brain injury.
Partial paralysis.
Memory loss.
But over the years, pieces returned.
Including the night Jonah Quinn died.
Mara and Adrian traveled with federal agents to meet him.
Thomas looked older than his forty-six years.
His voice was slow.
But his memory was clear.
“Jonah came to see me.”
Mara leaned forward.
“When?”
“Two days before he died.”
“What did he want?”
“Proof.”
“Of Victor?”
Thomas shook his head.
“Of the person paying Victor.”
Adrian’s expression sharpened.
“We thought it was Evelyn.”
“No.”
“Dominic?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
Thomas looked frightened even after all these years.
“Senator Warren Pike.”
The name changed everything.
Pike was one of Illinois’s most powerful politicians.
He had publicly praised the anti-corruption investigation.
Privately, Thomas claimed, he had financed Black Harbor for decades.
Victor had not been the top.
He had been enforcement.
Mara felt sick.
“Does Pike know you’re alive?”
“I think so.”
Thomas gave them a recording Jonah had hidden in his room.
On it, Pike could be heard ordering Victor to “handle the Quinn problem.”
Mara closed her eyes.
There it was.
The voice behind her brother’s death.
Adrian reached for her hand.
She held on.
Federal authorities moved quickly.
But Pike moved faster.
Before an arrest warrant could be served, he disappeared.
His plane never left the country.
His accounts remained untouched.
That meant he was still nearby.
At 2:16 the next morning, Mara woke to the estate alarm.
Adrian was already reaching for the gun in his bedside drawer.
“No.”
She caught his wrist.
He looked at her.
“You’re supposed to discourage violence.”
“I am.”
She handed him his phone.
Security feed.
No intruder.
Instead, someone had left a package at the front gate.
Inside was a single photograph.
Mara entering the Quinn Center that afternoon.
A red circle had been drawn over her chest.
Adrian’s face went cold.
“We’re moving you.”
“No.”
“Mara.”
“No more running.”
“This isn’t negotiable.”
“It absolutely is.”
They stared at each other.
Then Mara said:
“Pike expects me to hide.”
“Yes.”
“So we do the opposite.”
Adrian understood.
“You want to draw him out.”
“I want to finish what Jonah started.”
His jaw tightened.
“This could get you killed.”
“So could walking across Michigan Avenue.”
“Not helping.”
She took his hand.
“We do it together.”
After a long silence, Adrian nodded.
The trap was simple.
Mara announced a public press conference at the Quinn Center.
She would release Jonah’s final evidence.
Pike would believe it contained something capable of destroying him.
It did.
But what Pike didn’t know was that the entire building would be surrounded by federal agents.
The next afternoon, hundreds of reporters gathered.
Mara approached the podium.
Adrian watched from twenty feet away.
She began:
“My brother died because powerful men believed fear could erase the truth.”
Then a laser sight appeared on her chest.
Adrian saw it first.
“Mara!”
He ran.
May you like
A rifle cracked from the building across the street.
And Mara disappeared behind the podium.
