Chapter 6 - THE HUNTING LODGEThe tactical team reached the lodge before sunrise.
I did not go with them.
That fact required approximately forty minutes of argument.
My ribs won.
Ethan probably considered sending my ribs a thank-you card.
We watched through remote feeds from the command center.
The lodge sat eleven miles beyond the nearest town, surrounded by pine forest and accessible through one gravel road.
Thermal imaging detected three people inside.
Possibly four.
At 5:42 a.m., officers moved.
They found Rebecca in an upstairs bedroom.
Alive.
Bruised.
Terrified.
Handcuffed to a radiator.
Two men guarding the property were arrested.
Preston was gone.
He had left less than an hour earlier.
Rebecca was transported directly to a hospital under federal protection.
I arrived three hours later.
She looked worse than I expected.
Purple bruising along her jaw.
Cut lip.
Bandage around one wrist.
For several seconds we simply stared at each other.
We had spent our entire lives competing for a father’s approval neither of us should have wanted.
Now neither of us knew how sisters were supposed to behave.
Rebecca looked away first.
“You look terrible.”
“So do you.”
“Thanks.”
“You started it.”
A weak laugh escaped her.
Then she cried.
I sat beside the bed.
Carefully.
Everything I did lately involved the word carefully.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I knew which apology she meant.
Or at least where the list began.
I didn’t tell her it was okay.
It wasn’t.
“I believed him.”
“Dad?”
“All of them.”
She wiped her eyes.
“Dad said you abandoned us because you couldn’t handle responsibility. He said you bounced around from job to job in the military.”
I smiled bitterly.
“Technically assignments do change.”
“He told everyone you were basically a secretary.”
“I do send emails.”
That made her laugh again.
Then she winced.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Would it have changed anything?”
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
“No.”
Exactly.
Rebecca stared at her hands.
“What do you actually do?”
I considered the answer.
“I’m a Navy logistics officer.”
“Captain?”
“Yes.”
Her eyebrows rose.
“I Googled the rank once.”
“When?”
“After the deputy called you Captain Hart.”
Despite everything, I smiled.
Rebecca continued.
“I thought captain meant you drove a boat.”
“It occasionally does.”
“So you’re important?”
“Depends who you ask.”
“Dad?”
“Apparently not.”
That earned the first genuine laugh either of us had shared in maybe twenty years.
Then the humor disappeared.
Rebecca reached toward the water glass.
Her hands shook.
I helped.
“Tell me about Preston.”
Her face hardened.
“He started moving money through Hart accounts years ago.”
“You knew?”
“Not at first.”
“When did you learn?”
“Two years ago.”
“And you stayed?”
She looked ashamed.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because by then my signatures were everywhere.”
That made sense.
Preston’s real weapon had not been violence.
It had been gradual complicity.
One small favor.
One questionable document.
One explanation.
Then another.
By the time Rebecca understood, she was trapped inside the crime.
“He said if I went to authorities, I’d go to prison and Dad would lose the company.”
“So you helped cover it up.”
“Yes.”
There was no excuse in her voice.
Only fact.
“And Grandma?”
“She figured it out.”
“What happened?”
Rebecca closed her eyes.
“She confronted Preston.”
My stomach tightened.
“When?”
“Two days before her stroke.”
Silence.
“You think he hurt her?”
“No.”
Then:
“I don’t know.”
That was worse.
Rebecca told me Grandma had discovered not just financial fraud but something called Project Halcyon.
Preston had been purchasing rejected aerospace electronics from multiple manufacturers.
He removed failed tracking numbers, re-certified the units through shell laboratories and sold them into global supply chains.
Not only Hart products.
Hundreds of components.
Possibly thousands.
The forty-seven million dollars was merely one pathway.
“How much money total?”
Rebecca looked at me.
“Over two hundred million.”
I sat still.
“Who else is involved?”
“I don’t know all the names.”
“But you know some.”
“Yes.”
She gave investigators everything.
Executives.
Brokers.
Compliance officers.
A county official.
Two overseas distributors.
And one person I did not expect.
Calvin Ross.
Former director of personnel security for a defense contractor that had processed some of my clearance documentation eleven years earlier.
There was our leak.
Ross could have obtained the old service identification information.
The frame had been constructed years in advance.
“Why me specifically?” I asked.
Rebecca hesitated.
“Dad.”
“What about him?”
“He suggested you.”
The room went silent.
Even Ethan, standing by the window, turned.
I felt as though the bat had struck me again.
“What?”
Rebecca started crying.
“Not for the fake company.”
“Then for what?”
“Preston needed someone disconnected from Hart Industrial whose name could justify consulting payments.”
“And Dad gave him mine?”
“He said you would never know.”
I stared at the wall.
My father had not known about the fraud’s full scope.
Maybe.
But he had casually volunteered my identity because I was convenient.
Because I was absent.
Because in his mind, my life belonged to him if he needed it.
I stood.
Ethan immediately came closer.
“Claire.”
“I’m fine.”
That phrase had lost all meaning.
Rebecca grabbed my sleeve.
“There’s more.”
I looked down.
“Of course there is.”
“Preston took something from Grandma’s house.”
“What?”
“A flash drive.”
“What’s on it?”
“Everything.”
“Then why hasn’t he destroyed it?”
“Insurance.”
“Against whom?”
Rebecca whispered:
“The people above him.”
That changed the entire picture.
“You’re saying Preston isn’t the top.”
“No.”
“Who is?”
“I don’t know.”
She swallowed.
“But I heard him talking to someone yesterday.”
“What did they say?”
“One sentence.”
I waited.
Rebecca looked directly at me.
“They told him, ‘If Captain Hart gets the Halcyon file, we all burn.’”
My phone buzzed.
A text.
Unknown number.
A photograph.
Preston standing beside my grandmother’s grave.
Taken moments ago.
Underneath:
COME ALONE.
May you like
Then:
OR YOUR GRANDMOTHER’S SECRETS DIE WITH ME.
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