Chapter 4 - Page Forty-Two
The heavy leather journal sat on the dusty hood of Mark’s car like an unexploded bomb. The yard was deathly quiet except for the distant, rhythmic chirping of crickets and the low, throbbing engine of Arthur’s idling SUV. Mark hesitated, his fingers trembling as he shifted Lily to his left arm and reached out with his right hand. He flipped the cover open, the aged paper smelling faintly of the lavender perfume Sarah used to wear before the world fell apart. He didn't want to read it—part of him wanted to throw the cursed book into the dirt and run—but the desperate need for the truth anchored his boots to the pavement.
He flicked past the mundane entries of grocery lists and toddler milestones until he reached the dog-eared corner of page forty-two. The handwriting changed, becoming frantic, the ink smeared as if written in the dark or under extreme duress.
“Richard isn't hiding money from the board,” Sarah’s hurried scrawl read. “He’s trading children. The adoption agency is a front to launder human capital for the offshore accounts. If anything happens to me, Mark, don’t look at the police. Look at the trust fund.”
Mark stared at the words until they blurred together into meaningless black streaks. The trust fund—the very fund that was currently paying for Lily’s elite preschool and medical care, the fund Richard had forced Mark to sign over as a condition of their forced reconciliation after Sarah’s death. Every penny he had accepted to keep his family afloat was stained with blood.
"Found it?" Arthur’s voice cut through the silence, no longer conversational, but sharp and commanding. He was standing by the passenger door of his SUV now, his hand resting on the handle of a heavy metal briefcase. "You thought you were a crusader, Mark. You thought you were protecting your daughter by digging into accounts that didn't belong to you. But you’re just a mercenary who took the blood money."
Mark slammed the journal shut, the sound echoing off the stone walls of the estate. He looked up, his face pale, his bruised eye throbbing in rhythm with his pounding heart. "I took it to keep her alive," Mark growled, his voice trembling with a mixture of rage and profound self-loathing. "You killed her because she found out about the children."
"We didn't kill her, Mark," Arthur said quietly, stepping back into the shadows of his vehicle. "She tried to take Lily and run. The brakes failed because she forgot to service them. A tragic, domestic accident. Just like the one that’s about to happen on the winding mountain road outside your district."
Before Mark could process the threat, the headlights of Arthur’s SUV flicked off, plunging the driveway into total darkness, followed by the screech of rubber as the vehicle spun around and tore back toward the main gates. Simultaneously, the heavy wooden doors of the estate behind them swung wide open, spilling a bright bar of yellow light across the lawn. Richard stood in the doorway, flanked by two burly private security guards in identical black suits, holding a cellular phone to his ear.
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"Cut the power to the perimeter," Richard’s booming voice carried across the lawn as he stared directly at Mark. "And don't let them leave the property alive."
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