Chapter 4 - SECRETS BURIED UNDER SHINAGLOWMy breath hitched. My mother had died in a car accident when I was five—the same age Noah was now. That was the story Dad had always told me. A slick road on Highway 16, a rainy night, a hydroplaning sedan.
I stared at the screen. Was Evan trying to poison my mind? Trying to make me turn against the only man standing between us and total destruction?
I slammed the phone down just as Dad stepped back into the room with Detective Miller.
“The SWAT team is setting up an operation at the Ruston Way pier,” Miller explained quietly. “We’re going to simulate the loan approval at 11:50 AM from your father’s waterfront cabin. If Evan comes to confirm the transfer or collect his payload, we take him down.”
“It’s too dangerous,” I gasped. “He knows the cabin! He helped Dad rebuild the porch two years ago!”
“That’s precisely why it works,” Dad said, his eyes dark. “He thinks he knows every floorboard, every exit, every shadow in that place. He thinks I’m just an old man with a broken daughter.”
“Dad, wait—” I swallowed hard, my chest aching. “Evan just texted me. He… he mentioned Mom.”
Dad’s posture froze. Every muscle in his jaw locked instantly. The silence in the hospital room stretched until it felt like the glass windows would shatter under the pressure.
“What did he say?” Dad’s voice dropped an octave.
“He said… he said you were lying about how she died.”
Dad slowly turned his back to Detective Miller and walked up to the edge of my bed. He reached down, unbuttoning his right cufflink, and rolled back his sleeve. Across his forearm was a long, jagged scar—one I had seen a thousand times, always told it was from a shipping crate hook.
“Your mother didn’t die in an accident, Lena,” Dad said, his voice flat and terrifyingly cold. “She was murdered by a loan shark named Victor Drake. A man who tried to use my family to force me to move contraband through the Tacoma ports.”
I stared at him, stunned into complete silence.
“I tracked Drake down to an abandoned shipyard in 2004,” Dad continued, staring directly into my eyes. “He never hurt another family again. The police closed the file as a missing persons case because nobody found his body. Evan found out because two years ago, he went digging into my past to see if I had money buried somewhere.”
Detective Miller’s eyes widened in shock. “Art… are you confessing to a homicide?”
“I’m telling you why Evan thinks he can blackmail me,” Dad said, turning to Miller without a shred of fear. “He thinks I’ll give him the $250,000 to keep his mouth shut about Drake. He thinks my past makes me weak.”
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Dad looked back at me, a cold smile touching his lips.
“He forgot one thing, Lena. It didn't make me weak. It made me experienced.”
