Chapter 13 - The Blood Bargain
"Federal agent! Drop your weapon and keep your hands visible!" Julian’s voice cracked through the subterranean corridor like a whip, shattering the suffocating silence.
He moved with terrifying speed, shoving me behind the reinforced steel frame of the bunker door while raising his weapon toward the staircase, his tactical flashlight cutting through the floating dust.
A pathetic, quavering whimper echoed from the bottom of the wooden steps.
"Leah? Leah, don't shoot! It’s me! It’s your father!"
Julian didn't lower his gun. The white beam of his light locked onto the figure stumbling into the aisle between the tomato crates.
It was Arthur.
He looked like a corpse that had been dug up and forced into cheap clothes. The designer suit he had worn to the Charlotte City Club was gone; he was wearing an old, oil-stained windbreaker and faded corduroys. His eyes were bloodshot, his silver hair was wild and uncombed, and his hands were shaking so violently that he dropped his car keys onto the concrete with a loud jingle.
Behind him, hovering at the bottom of the steps like a terrified ghost in oversized sunglasses, was Eleanor. She was clutching a designer handbag that had been emptied of everything except her passport and prescription bottles.
"Step away from the racks, Arthur," Julian ordered coldly, his finger resting firmly outside the trigger guard. "Keep your hands above your shoulders."
"Julian, please!" Arthur sobbed, raising his hands, sinking down onto his knees on the damp cobblestones. "The black SUV... they’re outside! They were outside my house! They broke the front windows while we were packing! We had to crawl out through the back patio into the neighbor’s yard!"
"You led them here?" I stepped out from behind the door, my voice dripping with cold fury.
Eleanor rushed forward, her voice rising to a shrill shriek. "Leah! How could you speak to your father like that?! Those men have guns! They told us that if we didn't bring them the black drive from the safe, they would burn our house with us inside! We had to come! You have to give it to them! You have to save us!"
"Save you?" I walked toward them, stopping five paces away, holding the leather-bound ledger in plain sight. "Save you like you saved me when you texted me that I was no longer family? Like you saved me when you let Derek Caldwell run four million dollars in blood money through my business checking accounts?!"
Arthur’s eyes caught sight of the black ledger in my hand, and his face turned the color of chalk. "You... you opened the safe."
"I did," I said. "And now I know why you cried about the ninety-thousand-dollar foundation repair. You didn't repair a foundation, Arthur. You built a bunker to hide the ledger that made you an escrow trustee for Vanguard Crest."
Arthur collapsed entirely, burying his face in his dirt-stained hands. "I didn't have a choice, Leah! Ten years ago, the restaurant was eighty thousand in debt. A man came in... an attorney from New York representing Richard Caldwell. He said they needed an old, discreet brick-and-mortar business in the Carolinas to hold encrypted mirrors of their southern logistics accounts. He said I’d get fifteen thousand dollars a month just to let a server sit in my basement!"
"Fifteen thousand a month," I repeated, my chest heaving. "For ten years. That's one point eight million dollars. Where is it, Arthur? Because for the last eight years, I paid your mortgage. I paid for Brooke’s private college tuition. I paid for Eleanor’s country club dues while you told me you were barely scraping by!"
"He spent it!" Eleanor screamed, turning on Arthur with animal ferocity, her manicured nails digging into his windbreaker. "He put it into offshore speculative margin accounts Derek managed! Derek promised him a five-hundred-percent return so we could buy a villa in Hilton Head! He lost every penny! That’s why Derek proposed to Brooke—to keep Arthur from going to the SEC!"
I stood in the dim light of the basement, looking at the two people who had raised me. They weren't just selfish, entitled narcissists. They were corrupt, cowardly accomplices who had used my loyalty, my work ethic, and my love as a meat shield to protect their own petty greed.
"Give me the drive, Leah," Arthur pleaded, crawling toward me on his knees. "Sterling Hayes’ men are upstairs in the alley. If I hand them the drive, they promised they’ll let us walk away. They’ll give us fifty thousand in cash and let us disappear to Mexico. Please, darling. I’m your father!"
"You stopped being my father when you made me the legal guarantor on your dirty loans," I said, stepping back so his hands grasped only empty air.
I looked at Julian. "Is Agent Miller upstairs?"
Julian tapped the earpiece hidden in his collar. "Miller’s tactical unit just sealed both ends of South Tryon. The black Escalade is boxed in."
Arthur gasped, his eyes bulging in terror. "No! No, you don't understand! Hayes doesn't just have drivers! He has—"
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Before Arthur could finish his sentence, the heavy sound of a glass bottle shattering echoed from the floor above, followed immediately by the sharp, terrifying crack of automatic gunfire ripping through the front windows of The Mercer Table.
***
