Chapter 19 - The Viper’s Nest
"Don't call her," Marcus said, catching my arm before I could reach for my phone.
"She stood in my dining room four hours ago, Marcus," I said, my voice shaking with a rage that burned hotter than anything Charles had ever provoked. "She helped me arrest Charles! She was smiling while the FBI put him in handcuffs!"
"Because Charles had become a liability!" Marcus snapped, his tactical mind cutting through the betrayal. "Think about it, Evelyn! Why would Sarah help you throw Charles to the wolves? Because Charles was getting sloppy! He forged your name on an amateur real estate deal that brought local cops and federal agents to Tahoe. If the feds audited Charles for the bank fraud, they were going to find this vault! Sarah didn't help you take down Charles to save your house—she helped you arrest him so she could control the investigation before he talked about her family!"
I looked around the concrete bunker.
The pieces clicked together with the sickening precision of a jigsaw puzzle carved out of bone.
Charles hadn't left that photo on my fence to scare me into signing the deed to Savannah. He left it because he knew I would hire Sarah to fight it. He wanted Sarah in the room. He was threatening *her*, not me.
*“You don’t know who owns that land,”* Charles had screamed at Edgewood.
He wasn't talking about the Tahoe villa. He was talking about the commercial parcels in Carson City—parcels adjacent to the proposed naval rail extension line connecting Fallon Naval Air Station to the Pacific coast.
"They used my name as the front," I said, the realization hitting me like a physical blow. "If this vault was ever raided, whose name is on the house? Mine. Whose military login generated those logistics reports? Mine. If NCIS finds this room without context, I don't look like a victim, Marcus. I look like a traitor who was selling operational data to maritime consulting firms."
"And Sarah Vance has the original copies of your military authorizations," Marcus added grimly. "She can make this room look like your private intelligence cache with one phone call to the federal prosecutor."
Suddenly, the security app on Marcus’s phone let out a low, warbling chirp.
He pulled it out of his pocket and tapped the screen.
The thermal camera feed at the main gate flickered to life. A dark blue Audi sedan had just pulled onto the driveway, stopping at the severed fence line.
A woman stepped out into the falling dusk, holding a leather briefcase and an umbrella.
May you like
Sarah Vance had come back.
***
