Chapter 6 - The Basement Office
The rain had turned into a steady, freezing drizzle by the time Marcus Vance’s battered silver sedan crawled into the gravel lot behind the abandoned timber yard. Vivian sat inside the driver’s seat of the stolen Ford van, her hands locked so tightly around the steering wheel her knuckles showed white.
The headlights of Vance’s car cut through the gray gloom, illuminating the mist rising from the wet pine pallets. A passenger door opened, but it wasn't a federal marshal who stepped out into the mud. It was a woman in her late thirties with sharp eyes, a charcoal wool coat, and a leather briefcase tucked under her arm—someone Vivian recognized instantly from the legal files in Matteo’s study.
Evelyn Cross. Former senior litigation partner at Draven & Associates, who had mysteriously vanished from public dockets eighteen months ago.
Vivian didn't reach for the door handle. She rolled down the window two inches, the cold air biting her skin. "I asked for a marshal, Mr. Vance."
Marcus Vance stepped out from the driver’s side, leaning heavily on a wooden cane. He looked older than his photographs in the legal gazettes, his hair completely white, his face mapped with the stress of a man who had spent three years hiding from process servers on retainer.
"Marshals take three weeks to vet a tip, Mrs. Draven," Vance called out, keeping his distance from the van. "Evelyn here took thirty minutes once I told her whose ledger you were holding. She didn't vanish from the firm because she retired, Vivian. She vanished because she was the one who drew up the acquisition papers for your father’s land."
Evelyn walked forward, stopping a yard from the van window. She looked at Vivian’s pale face, her swollen frame, and the ruined edge of her designer dress beneath the borrowed parka. There was no triumph in Evelyn’s eyes—only a profound, exhausted resignation.
"You shouldn't have run alone," Evelyn said quietly. "Matteo doesn't just manage shipping lines and real estate. The ledger you have is only the index. The real records—the ones showing how the state banking board cleared the title transfers after your father’s medical file was altered—are locked in a vault under the dry dock offices in Norfolk."
"My father didn't sign those papers willingly," Vivian said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, steady register.
"No, he didn't," Evelyn replied, pulling a heavy manila folder from her briefcase and holding it up so Vivian could see the red wax seal. "He fought them for four months. And when he threatened to go public with the audit, Matteo didn't have to pull a trigger. He just had the clinic adjust his heart medication to a lethal baseline, signed off by a corrupt county coroner who now sits on the state municipal zoning board."
Vivian stared at the folder. The room seemed to tilt slightly, the heavy scent of damp wood and diesel fuel mixing in her throat. Every defense she had built over four years of marriage—the quiet compliance, the carefully hidden cash, the illusion that she was merely a sheltered wife—dissolved into ash. She hadn't been protected by Matteo Draven. She had been kept in the house of the man who murdered her father, sleeping beside him every night while he managed the portfolio built on her family’s grave.
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"Get in the back of my car," Evelyn said, opening the rear door of the sedan. "We have six hours before Viktor Romanov traces the toll transponder on that delivery van. If you want justice for your father, you're going to need more than thirty thousand dollars and a burner phone. You're going to need to look your sister in the eye and find out how much Camille knew about the night your father died."
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