Chapter 3 - Broken Glass and Bandages
The master bedroom upstairs was freezing. When I pushed the door open, the room smelled faintly of antiseptic, lavender, and cold fear.
Eliza was curled up on the far corner of our bed, wrapped in an oversized wool cardigan I had left behind six months ago. Her hood was pulled low over her brow. When the floorboards creaked under my combat boots, she flinched violently, pulling her knees tight against her ribs, her knuckles white.
"It’s me, Ellie," I said softly, dropping my duffel bag by the threshold. "It’s Nolan. Nobody else is coming up here."
She didn't move for several seconds. Then, slowly, the oversized hood slid back an inch. Her eyes—wide, hazel, and rimmed with swollen red veins—locked onto mine. She wasn't just crying; she was hyperventilating, struggling to draw air into her lungs.
"Nolan... they told me you wouldn't believe me," she whispered, her voice fractured. "Brooke said... she said you called from Germany and told them to throw me into the street. She said you hated me."
I crossed the room in two strides, knelt beside the edge of the mattress, and pulled her gently into my arms. The moment my chest met hers, she collapsed. All the stiff, desperate defense she had built up over the past seventy-two hours disintegrated into heavy, guttural sobs.
My fingers brushed against the back of her head. It made my stomach violently churn. My mother had not just shaved her head with clippers; she had taken a disposable razor to the scalp in an erratic, vicious frenzy. There were jagged red scabs and raw razor burns tracing along the nape of her neck.
"I'm sorry," I murmured against her temple, burying my face in the few soft strands near her ear that had escaped Diane's shears. "I should have seen it. I should have known what they were capable of."
"The notebook..." Eliza gasped out, clinging to the fabric of my uniform. "Did you look at the last page? Nolan, you have to read the last page before they burn the files downstairs."
"I haven't opened the back yet," I admitted, pulling back to look at her bruised face. A faint yellowing bruise marked her left cheekbone where Brooke had held her down. "What is on the last page, Ellie?"
"It’s not just your father's estate," she whispered, shivering despite the thick wool sweater. "Six months ago, Brooke took a bridge loan from an offshore syndicate in Miami. She put this house—our house—up as collateral. But to do that, she needed a signature from a spouse. She used my social security number, Nolan. She forged my name on a hard-money balloon note."
My jaw tightened. "How much?"
"Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars," Eliza said. "The seventy thousand they told you about downstairs? That was just the delinquent interest payment that came due last Friday. When the collectors came knocking on the front porch while you were overseas, Brooke panicked. She knew if you found out, you’d cut off her access to the family trust forever. So she and Diane decided to destroy me."
"They wanted to paint you as an unstable, adulterous thief," I said, putting the pieces together. "If you were arrested for stealing seventy thousand, no one would believe your claims about Brooke's fraud."
"And if you divorced me in disgrace," Eliza added, her tears spilling onto my hands, "I would be forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement in exchange for dropping the fake charges. That’s what Diane told me while she was holding the clippers to my head. She said: 'Sign the debt assumption agreement, or I’ll make sure Nolan sees photos of you bald and disgraced across every screen in this town.'"
I reached into my pocket, pulled out the worn leather notebook Eliza had passed me in the hallway, and flipped to the final section. Tucked inside the leather lining was a folded bank receipt stamped with a red seal from the Cayman Islands National Depository.
The account holder wasn't Brooke Mercer.
It was Diane Mercer and a co-signatory named Victor Vance.
I stared at the name Vance. The room seemed to drop ten degrees colder.
"Victor Vance?" I breathed out. "Vance is the county district attorney."
May you like
Eliza nodded slowly, her eyes filled with dark dread. "Brooke didn't hire Evan Pierce, Nolan. Diane did. But Evan isn't a debt collector. Evan is an investigator from the state inspector general’s office. He’s been tracking DA Vance for eight months. And the trap Diane set for me just snapped shut on her own neck."
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