Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
brANDON
Luke comes to my office on Thursday.
I’ve been back at my desk for a few days after spending one day in the hospital and one day at home with cracked ribs, a broken nose, an injured jaw, and a right hand that a doctor wrapped without asking too many questions.
The bruising has settled into something spectacular.
My assistant did an outstanding job of not reacting when I walked in this morning.
I called ahead and told her I’d had a fall.
She’s worked for me for four years, and she knows I don’t fall.
Luke knocks on the open door at ten. He’s in gym clothes—he came straight from training, which tells me he scheduled this for the first break Reyes allows. He looks at my face without making a sound. Then he comes in, closes the door, and sits down across from me.
He sets a file folder on the desk in front of me.
“Everything,” he says. “Like I promised.”
I look at the folder. Then at him. “Walk me through it.”
He walks me through every page of it. Every jot and tittle. Every dark, horrible secret. Everything I’ve never wanted to know but now can’t unknow.
He doesn’t give me the watered-down version he would have given me before—the careful, managed version that protected me from the Marin variable.
This is the full, unedited, unadulterated version.
He walks me through all of Evelyn’s positions and how Bill mapped them.
Daniel’s package and what was in it. The 2011 memo on Andi and her mental hospital incarceration.
He shows how the same verbiage that was used to condemn her was used against her again recently.
With my help. Then he walks me through the second file and what it establishes about Jackson and Delia Rhoades.
I can clearly see the trail of bodies through the witness chain and what’s been happening to everyone who stood in Evelyn’s way.
Then he shares his discovery of the listening device in their home.
The gas station ambush. The hospital death.
The center’s server. The files that were left on Mrs. Alvarez’s desk.
Two specific children’s names were printed and placed where Andi would find them.
One of them was Kelly, the young girl who has stolen our family’s hearts.
The one I’ve called my little sister from day one and would protect with my life.
The purposeful adoption delays that are preventing her from claiming our last name as her own.
Legally, at least. She’s ours, regardless of their tactics.
I listen without interrupting. I’ve been good at this my entire career—receiving information in sequence, not reacting to each piece but putting the puzzle pieces where they belong until they assemble into one large picture in front of me.
I do it now the way I do it in every case that matters—without rushing the picture toward a conclusion before it’s complete.
When he finishes, the office is quiet.
I look at the file on my desk.
“Kelly’s adoption,” I say.
“Yes.”
“She’s been blocking it.”
“Bill thinks so. The pattern fits her MO—administrative friction, regulatory questions, nothing that looks deliberate from the outside. But it keeps stalling at the same points, through the same channels.” He looks at his hands.
“Our parents have been fighting this for almost two years. They didn’t know why. Neither did I.”
I think about dinner at my parents’ house. Marin was at the table while my mother described the delays. The small sound of sympathy Marin made. Filing it. Knowing exactly why the process kept stalling was because she was connected to the person making it stall.
“Marin was in the room when Mom mentioned the delays,” I say.
Luke looks at me.
“At dinner. When I brought her to meet our family.” I keep my voice level. “Marin sat at that table and listened to our mother talk about a process she couldn’t understand and made a sympathetic sound.”
Something moves across Luke’s face. Not anger yet—but that anger is simmering just below the surface, ready to explode like an unpredictable volcano. I’ve learned this part of him is more dangerous than the explosion itself.
“Yes, she knew,” he says. “Andi and I have already talked that scenario through.”
“She knew everything that was happening to our family, and she sat at our parents’ table and showed sympathy.
” I look at the file. “I want you to know that I understand now why you didn’t tell me sooner.
The order mattered. I’m not arguing with it.
” I stop and set the file down. “I’m telling you what I know so the picture is complete. ”
Luke nods slowly.
“The accidents,” I say. “Andi’s crash in Phoenix. Mine.”
He looks at me. “Both.”
“Evelyn ordered them.”
“Yes.”
I absorb this. I force myself to pause—to breathe it in, to swallow it down—because I’ve built my whole professional life on not reacting. And right now, that’s the only thing keeping my voice level.
“She tried to kill Andi,” I say. “Twice.”
“Twice that we know of.”
“And my accident—”
“Was meant as a warning,” Luke says. “After you found Garrett Cole, she needed you to slow down.”
I look at the wall behind Luke’s head. At the framed case, the precedents and the degrees, and the photograph of Luke and me at his first professional fight, him at twenty-two, me at twenty-eight, and both of us thinking the world was straightforward.
“What do you need from me?” I ask.
Luke leans forward. “The financial connections you’ve been mapping—the Dalton Group, Garrett Cole’s sealed case, everything you’ve built in the last few months. Bill needs it. No copies. The originals, your sources, and how you came to the conclusions and calculations.”
“He’ll have it by the end of the day.”
“And Brandon—” He stops. Tries again. “I need you to be careful. Whoever came to your condo knew you’d been to Marin’s. They were positioned. That means she’s still reporting and they’re still watching.”
“I know.”
“Which means—”
“I know,” I say again. “I will not do anything that tips them. I have enough professional discipline to run out the play.” I look at him.
“What I’m not going to do is pretend to still be in a relationship with a woman who sat at our parents’ table and watched our mother describe something she was complicit in. ”
“How do you end it without—”
“Carefully,” I say. “I’ll end it in a way that reads as a normal breakup. Incompatibility. Distance. Nothing that suggests I know what she is.” I straighten the file on my desk. “I’ve built entire cases on less theater than this.”
Luke looks at me for a moment.
“Brandon,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry. About all of it. The timing, the holding back, what it cost you not knowing.” He holds my eyes. “I was trying to protect you, and I did it the wrong way.”
I look at my brother. The man who showed up at my hospital bedside before I’d called anyone.
Who’s sitting across from me right now with bruises from a gym session still visible on his knuckles, having come straight from training because the first break Reyes allowed was the earliest he could get here.
“I know why you did it,” I say. “We can revisit the reasoning later. Right now, there’s work to do.”
He nods.
My phone buzzes on the desk. I look at it—Bill’s number.
I pick up.
“There’s been another death,” Bill says.
“A former associate of Strategic Crisis Consulting—someone Daniel identified as a potential corroborating witness. Found in his apartment this morning. The preliminary cause is a drug overdose.” Nothing on the line but the room he’s calling from.
“He had no documented history of drug use.”
I look at Luke across the desk. He reads it in my face.
“When?” I ask.
“Medical examiner’s estimate is sometime last night.
” Bill’s voice is careful. “Brandon. The timing suggests they moved on him within twenty-four hours of Daniel’s attorney making contact.
Which means either there’s a leak somewhere in Daniel’s communication chain, or they’re running surveillance on anyone they’ve identified as a potential witness. ”
“Or both,” I say.
“Or both,” Bill agrees. “I’m calling Andi next. I wanted you to have it first.”
He hangs up. I set the phone down on the desk. Luke is watching me intently. He’s my brother, he knows my tells, my expressions, and my moods better than anyone.
“Fourth death,” I say.
“Go on.”
“They moved on him within a day of contact.” I look at the file between us. “She’s not doing general containment anymore. She’s running active interdiction. Anyone who surfaces as a potential witness gets eliminated before we can reach them.”
“Which means we stop trying to reach people through Daniel’s network,” Luke says. “We work with what we have, and we move on the documentation in front of us.”
“Bill needs to know that.”
“Bill already knows that.” Luke stands. “End of day on the files.”
“End of day,” I confirm.
He picks up his jacket. At the door, he stops.
“Mom and Dad,” he says. “Kelly. I’m going to tell them tonight. About what we found on the center’s server. About the adoption.” He looks at me. “I wanted you to know before I said anything.”
I think about my parents’ kitchen. My mother’s hand on Kelly’s shoulder. It’ll happen. My father’s quiet certainty.
“Tell them carefully,” I say. “Tell them enough to make them safe without making them afraid.”
“I know how to do that.”
“I know you do.” I look at my desk. At the file he left. At everything we know and everything we’re about to do with it. “Luke.”
He looks back.
“Make them pay for every single person on that list.”
He holds my eyes for a moment.
“Count on it,” he says.
He walks out.
I open the file, and I get to work.
LUKE
We go to my parents’ house that evening.