Chapter 4 - THE STRANGER WAITING OUTSIDE HER BROTHER’S SCHOOL
A third message arrived on Audrey’s phone.
She gasped.
Eli again.
Someone says you sent a driver for me. Is that true?
“No.”
Audrey was already calling.
“Eli?”
Nothing.
“Eli, answer me.”
A young voice came through.
“Hey.”
She nearly collapsed with relief.
“Where are you?”
“Outside school. There’s a guy here.”
Nicholas crossed the room.
“Put him on speaker.”
Audrey did.
Eli sounded nervous.
“He says he works for Mr. Rainer.”
Nicholas spoke.
“Eli, my name is Nicholas Rainer. I did not send anyone to pick you up.”
Silence.
“Then who is this?”
“Don’t ask him. Walk away.”
A man shouted in the background.
Audrey grabbed the edge of the table.
“Eli!”
“I’m walking.”
“Go somewhere public,” Nicholas said. “Do you see people?”
“A gas station.”
“Go inside.”
The stranger shouted again.
Then footsteps.
Running.
Audrey covered her mouth.
“Eli?”
“I’m inside.”
“Lock yourself in the restroom if you have to,” Audrey said.
“There’s a cop buying coffee.”
Nicholas shut his eyes briefly.
“Go to him.”
Twenty minutes later, Eli and Audrey’s aunt were under police protection.
Only then did Audrey begin to cry.
Not dramatically.
No collapse.
No screaming.
She sat in the library chair while tears ran silently down her face.
Nicholas stood several feet away because he still remembered how she had stepped backward from him.
“I nearly got him killed.”
“No.”
“I should have kept my mouth shut.”
“No.”
“If I hadn’t—”
Nicholas crouched so they were at eye level.
“Do you know what men like Graham depend on?”
Audrey wiped her cheek.
“What?”
“They hurt someone. Then they convince that person every consequence afterward is their fault.”
She stared at him.
“He went after your brother because Graham made that choice. Not because you spoke.”
For a long moment, Audrey said nothing.
Then she whispered, “You sound like you learned that somewhere.”
Nicholas looked toward the floor.
“My father used to say loyalty was built by making people fear what happened if they left.”
Audrey waited.
“I believed him.”
“And now?”
Nicholas looked around the mansion.
“Now I have an employee with bruises because everyone was too afraid to tell me the man I trusted most was dangerous.”
He stood.
“Maybe fear only looks like loyalty from the top.”
Simon called again forty minutes later.
This time his voice carried urgency.
“We found Jenna.”
Audrey jumped up.
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
Audrey covered her mouth.
Simon continued.
“She’s been staying with her oldest daughter in Pennsylvania. She was afraid to come home.”
Nicholas closed his eyes.
“What did Graham do?”
“Threatened her son’s business. Threatened to plant evidence in her daughter’s apartment. She left.”
“And the missing bracelet?”
“Graham planted it.”
Nicholas’s face went hard.
“There’s more,” Simon said.
“Of course there is.”
“He was preparing another theft case.”
“Against whom?”
Silence.
Then Simon said, “Audrey.”
She went still.
“Me?”
Simon explained.
Invoices had been created using Audrey’s staff identification.
Electronic access logs had been altered.
Copies of her signature had been attached to purchase requests.
Nearly three million dollars could eventually be attributed to her.
Graham was not simply trying to silence her.
He had been building a criminal identity around her for months.
Nicholas looked at Audrey.
She looked physically ill.
“Why me?”
Simon answered carefully.
“Because you had access to enough rooms for the story to sound possible. No financial history. No powerful family. No lawyer. And after you disappeared, most people would assume the evidence explained why.”
Audrey sank into the chair.
“After I disappeared?”
Nobody answered.
They did not need to.
Nicholas walked to the window.
For fifteen years, men had feared him.
He had thought that made everyone under his protection safer.
Now he understood what someone had done inside the shelter of his reputation.
Graham had not feared Nicholas’s power.
He had borrowed it.
May you like
Every time he told Audrey nobody would believe her, he was really saying Nicholas Rainer wouldn’t believe you.
That realization felt like betrayal from two directions.
