Chapter 29
IRIS
The mahogany doors of the VIP Study swing open.
I stand in the center of the Persian rug, my boots planted on the floor. My heart beats against the wire taped flat to the center of my chest.
Judge William Hale steps into the room.
He’s wearing a charcoal overcoat over a perfectly tailored navy suit. His silver hair is immaculate. He carries himself with the unassailable authority of a federal courtroom.
But tonight, looking at him through the lens of the Black Ledger, the illusion dissolves. I don’t see a father. I see a sociopath wearing a very expensive mask.
He isn’t alone.
He’s flanked by two men in cheap, dark suits. They have the thick necks, broad shoulders, and restless, scanning eyes of off-duty police officers. They look like the cleaners Cassian warned me about—corrupt badges on my father’s payroll who know how to make a crime scene disappear.
My father stops ten feet away from me.
I wait for it. A part of me, the pathetic, bruised child that still lives somewhere deep in my ribcage, expects him to rush forward.
I expect him to pull me into his arms, to look at my oversized T-shirt, the cargo pants, and the fading bruises on my neck, and ask me if I’m okay.
I expect at least a flicker of relief that his only child is alive.
He doesn’t rush forward. He doesn’t soften.
His cold blue eyes sweep over me, taking in my boots and the rigid set of my jaw. His expression flattens into a look of mild, exhausted irritation. He looks at me the exact same way he looked at a wilted flower on an expensive arrangement.
I’m not a daughter who survived a kidnapping. I’m a political liability.
“Where is the drive, Iris?” he asks without a hint of affection or joy at our reunion.
He just wants his property.
“Daddy?” I whisper, letting my voice shake. “Is that what you’re going to ask first?”
“Where is it, Iris?”
I wrap my arms around my waist, shrinking my posture back. “I hid it,” I lie, letting a terrified breath escape my lips. “Daddy, the Russians... they said you paid them. They said you told them to burn the estate with me inside. Why would they say that?”
He sighs. “I don’t have time for your theatrics tonight. The Mayor is expecting me at a fundraiser breakfast in seven hours, and I have to manage the press fallout of your disappearance. Where did you hide the drive?”
My father exchanges a brief, annoyed glance with the cleaner to his right.
“You were always far too emotional, Iris,” he says, stepping up to the edge of the table, putting the wood between us. “You let your severe anxiety govern your logic. You chose to interfere with my affairs, and you created a catastrophic liability.”
“But I’m your daughter,” I gasp, forcing a wet tear to spill over my lashes. “You sent them to burn the estate with me inside?”
My father stares at me. He doesn’t look panicked. He doesn’t look like a man whose darkest, bloodiest secret has been uncovered. He looks like a tired judge staring down a hostile witness.
“I sent them to save my legacy,” he states, his voice dropping to a cold, flat register.
“A legacy I spent forty years meticulously building. You think this world runs on good intentions? It runs on pure power. It runs on control. Elias was going to destroy everything I built with his little digital crusade. The hitman was supposed to simply eliminate the threat in this room, but he became greedy. He took the evidence, and he took you.”
“He took a bullet for me,” I cry softly, still playing the desperate victim. “He protected me.”
My father scoffs, a short, ugly sound. “He was a feral dog on a leash. I saved him from lethal injection five years ago, and he betrayed me. If he forgot his place, that’s his failure. But you...”
He looks at me, his eyes narrowing with cruel, calculating disgust.
“You were always weak,” he says, his words designed to gut me.
“You crumble under the slightest amount of pressure. You couldn’t even handle ordering the wine for a summer solstice party without breaking down.
You wept for a month over that pathetic college boy, Leo.
You thought I didn’t know? I practically packed his bags and bought his ticket out of state myself to prove how fragile your little teenage romances were.
Did you really think you had the constitution to survive the fallout of a federal blackmail scandal?
I couldn’t risk the FBI finding you. I couldn’t risk you sitting in a brightly lit interrogation room, crying and bargaining for a plea deal.
You’re a liability, Iris. You always have been. ”
They’re the culmination of every fear I ever had about my worth to him.
But they don’t hurt. They don’t cut. Because the man saying them is nothing to me anymore.
The tears stop.
I straighten my spine, dropping my arms to my sides.
“I have the Ledger,” I say, my voice dropping to a lethal, flat calm.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the small sleek metal flash drive, holding it up so the ambient light catches its casing.
“I have the routing numbers. I have the audio of your phone call with Kirill. It’s backed up on secure servers. ”
My father’s eyes lock onto the drive in my hand. “I highly doubt that,” he says smoothly. “You don’t have the technical expertise to bypass encryption, and you said so yourself. The hitman is dead, and the Russians took care of his estate.”
“Give me the drive,” he demands, holding out his manicured hand. “Give it to me right now, and we’ll handle this quietly.”
“Or what?” I ask, stepping to the side of the desk, keeping the wood between us. “You’ll kill me yourself?”
My father looks at me. There’s no love in his eyes. There’s no hesitation. There’s only cold, political calculation.
He lowers his hand and turns to the cleaner on his left.
“She’s clearly suffering from severe psychological trauma following her abduction,” my father says, his voice effortlessly taking on a practiced, mournful tone. “The stress of the horrific ordeal simply became too much for her to bear.”
He looks back at me, delivering the sentence.
“Make it look like a tragic suicide. Put the gun in her hand.”
The cleaner nods. He steps forward, his hand reaching inside his cheap suit jacket, his fingers wrapping around the grip of a suppressed weapon.
I don’t hesitate. I reach behind my back. My fingers close around the grip. I rip the gun from my waistband, thrusting the barrel forward as I snap the safety down with a click. I aim at the center of the cleaner’s chest.
The cleaner freezes, his hand still tucked inside his suit jacket.
My father flinches, taking a half-step back.
“Take your hand off your weapon,” I command. My voice doesn’t waver.
The cleaner stares at me. He’s waiting for signs of a panic—waiting for my wrists to wobble or my breath to hitch. When I don’t give him either, his eyes narrow.
“Ms. Hale,” the cleaner says, his tone calm. He speaks to me like I am a jumper on a ledge. “You’re holding a firearm. If you pull that trigger, you cross a line you can’t come back from. You arrange flowers. You don’t shoot people.”
“Take your hand out of your jacket,” I repeat.
“She’s bluffing,” my father snaps, though he’s backed into the edge of the desk. “Shoot her! Put a bullet in her head!”
The cleaner doesn’t move. “Put it down, kid. You’ll just hit my vest. Then I shoot you, and it hurts a lot more.”
“You aren’t wearing ceramic plates,” I say. I can almost hear Cassian’s voice in my ear. “You’re wearing soft Kevlar to hide it under that suit. I’m holding nine-millimeter hollow points. At eight feet, they don’t just bruise. They expand. They’ll pulp your lungs before you clear your holster.”
The cleaner’s jaw tightens. He realizes I’m not only holding a gun—I know how it works.
“What is he paying you?” I ask, the front sight locked on his chest. “A hundred thousand?”
“It’s just a job, Ms. Hale,” he says. He shifts his weight to his back foot, preparing to move.
“It’s a suicide mission,” I counter. I don’t look at my father; I keep my eyes on the man I’m about to kill.
“My father burns his assets. He used Elias, then he killed him. He used the Russians, then he left them to die. Look at him. He ordered the execution of his own daughter to protect a campaign. Do you really think he’s going to let you walk away as the only loose end? ”
The cleaner pauses.
“Once you pull that trigger and I’m dead, you’re the only witness left,” I say, my voice steady. “You become a liability. He’ll have your partner shoot you in the back of the head while you’re rolling me into the rug.”
The second cleaner, standing near the door, shifts. His eyes dart toward my father. They are corrupt, but they aren’t stupid.
“Don’t listen to her!” my father shouts, panic bleeding into his voice. “Do your jobs! I own your pensions! Shoot her!”
The lead cleaner stares at me. He calculates the risk, betting that a socialite won’t actually pull the trigger.
“Sorry, kid,” he mutters.
His shoulder twitches. He commits to the draw.
“Cassian.”
The false plaster panel behind my father explodes outward.
Cassian erupts from the shadows of the wall void in a blur of black tactical gear and terrifying, fluid violence.
Phut. Phut.
The suppressed gun in Cassian’s right hand cycles twice in a fraction of a second.
The cleaner reaching for his gun takes a hollow-point round directly through his right eye. His skull snaps back with a sickening, wet crack, a spray of dark blood painting the bookshelves, and he drops to the marble floor like a stone.
The second cleaner spins rapidly, his hand flying to his hip holster, but Cassian is already moving. Keeping his injured left arm locked tightly to his ribs, Cassian shifts his aim a fraction of an inch and pulls the trigger again. The second hollow-point catches the man perfectly in the temple.
The second cleaner hits the floor, dead before the first body even settles.