Chapter 3 - THE CHILD'S DRAWING
The door swung inward with a heavy thud.
Arthur moved faster than my eyes could track, stepping in front of Chloe and me, the handgun leveled directly at the doorway.
A figure stumbled into the entryway, dripping wet from the freezing rain, gasping for air.
It was Jason.
He was still wearing his tailored wedding tuxedo, but it was ruined. His crisp white shirt was torn, his lip was bleeding, and his hands were raised in pure terror as he stared down the barrel of Arthur’s gun.
“Don’t shoot!” Jason begged, dropping to his knees on my hardwood floor. “Please, Colonel Brooks. I came to warn her.”
“Give me one reason I shouldn’t put a bullet through your knee right now,” Arthur growled, not lowering the weapon an inch.
“Jason,” Chloe sobbed from the couch, pulling my old cardigan tighter around herself. “You watched them hurt me. You stood by the door and watched your mother kick me.”
Jason looked at her, tears streaming down his bruised face. “I had to, Chloe. I swear to God, I had to. If I stopped her, if I fought back, she was going to make the call.”
“What call?” I demanded, stepping out from behind Arthur.
Jason reached slowly into his ruined tuxedo jacket. Arthur’s finger tightened on the trigger, but Jason only pulled out a folded, crumpled piece of paper. He slid it across the floor toward me.
I picked it up cautiously. It was a child’s drawing. Stick figures drawn in bright, messy crayons. A tall man, a little boy, and an older woman with angry red scribbles entirely covering her face. At the bottom, in clumsy block letters, it read: For Daddy.
“His name is Leo,” Jason choked out, burying his face in his hands. “He’s five. He’s my son from a relationship before I met you, Chloe. Catherine found out about him three years ago. She hid him away at a private facility upstate. She told me if I ever disobeyed her, she would make sure Leo vanished forever.”
My heart plummeted. The anger burning in my chest shifted into a complex, horrifying realization.
“She forced you to marry me,” Chloe realized, her voice trembling. “To get access to my trust. To get the land.”
“She needs the ledger buried under your building,” Jason confessed, looking up at Arthur. “She’s bankrupt. The people her husband owed money to are calling in their debts. If she doesn’t give them the ledger by sunrise, they’ll kill her. And she’ll take Leo down with her.”
Arthur slowly lowered his gun.
“You slipped the silver key into Chloe’s purse during the reception,” Arthur said.
Jason nodded frantically. “It’s the only leverage I had left. The key opens the deposit box containing the original blueprints of the condo’s foundation. Without it, they’d have to demolish the whole block to find the ledger. I tried to hide it with Chloe to buy time, but Catherine caught me. That’s why her men beat me.”
May you like
Jason looked at me, his eyes wide with desperation. “She tracked my phone. She knows I’m here. She’s coming with an extraction team, and they have orders to burn this apartment to the ground.”
The heavy glass of my living room window suddenly shattered inward, and a small, metallic cylinder bounced onto the rug, hissing thick, white smoke.
