Chapter 5 - THE CHILD’S DRAWING
"Marcus!" I screamed, lunging toward the heavy mahogany door. I beat my fists against the wood until my knuckles bruised. "Open this door! Open it right now!"
"I can't do that, Eleanor," my brother's voice drifted through the thick wood, calm and terrifyingly composed. "I promised I would protect this family. And sometimes, protecting the family means keeping the ugly truths buried in the dark."
Lorenzo didn't scream. He didn't pound on the door. He stepped back, shining his phone flashlight around the destroyed room, his mind calculating, assessing the trap we had just walked into.
"You killed him," Lorenzo said, his voice cutting through the door with lethal precision. "You killed my father, Uncle Marcus. And you left him to rot at the docks."
A heavy sigh echoed from the hallway.
"I didn't kill your father, Lorenzo," Marcus said, and for a fraction of a second, I heard a genuine, weary sorrow in his voice. "Your father was a monster. I just stopped him from taking you with him."
I froze. My hands dropped from the wood.
"Taking him?" I breathed, staring at the door. "What are you talking about?"
"Richard was drowning, Eleanor," Marcus explained, his voice growing harder, the guilt solidifying into anger. "He was ten million dollars in debt to Arthur Vance. He had leveraged the hotels, the properties, everything. Arthur Vance gave him a choice: hand over the entire corporate portfolio, or hand over his life."
"Richard wouldn't sell the company," I whispered, the memories of Richard's fierce, paranoid pride flooding back.
"No, he wouldn't," Marcus agreed. "So he made a different deal with Arthur Vance. He offered Arthur a hostage to guarantee the debt would be paid."
Lorenzo stepped up beside me, the flashlight beam illuminating his pale, horrified face.
"He offered me," Lorenzo realized, the words sounding like glass shattering in the small room.
"He brought you to this hotel that night, Lorenzo," Marcus said, his voice thick with emotion. "He was going to hand you over to Arthur Vance’s men. To keep you as collateral until he could flee the country and rebuild his fortune. I found out. I tracked him here."
I looked down at the child's drawing in Lorenzo’s hand. I LOVE DADDY.
Richard hadn't put it in his pocket out of love. He had taken it from Lorenzo while he was trying to sell his own son to a loan shark.
"I fought him in that room," Marcus confessed, the ghost of that violent night bleeding into his words. "I took his gun. I told him to run and never come back. I told him if he ever showed his face to you or Eleanor again, I would kill him myself."
"Then whose blood is on this drawing?" Lorenzo demanded, holding the paper up to the door.
"His," Marcus said quietly. "I hit him with the lamp. He bled. But he ran, Lorenzo. I swear to God, he ran. He took the freight elevator down to the alley. I took you back home and put you in your bed before your mother even woke up."
"If he ran," I cried, tears streaming down my face, "then why did you write 'They took him to the docks' on the back of this drawing?"
Silence hung heavy in the hallway.
"I didn't write that, Eleanor," Marcus said softly.
The realization hit me like a physical blow.
Richard had written it. In his own blood. Before he fled the room. He was trying to leave a message. He was trying to warn us that someone else had found him.
"Arthur Vance caught him in the alley," Lorenzo said, putting the pieces together with terrifying clarity. "Arthur’s men took him to the docks."
"I went to the docks the next morning," Marcus confessed, his voice breaking. "I was terrified Arthur had him. But I didn't find Richard. I didn't find a body. I only found one thing."
The sound of a heavy metal key sliding into the lock echoed through the door.
"I'm opening the door," Marcus said. "I'm going to put my hands up. Please, Lorenzo. I just wanted to protect you."
The lock clicked. The heavy door swung inward.
Marcus stood in the hallway, his hands raised in surrender. He looked old. The pristine, confident CEO I had relied on for two decades looked utterly broken.
He slowly reached into his suit jacket pocket.
Lorenzo tensed, ready to fight, but Marcus didn't pull a weapon.
He pulled out a heavy, ornate silver rosary.
I gasped, covering my mouth.
I had given Richard that rosary on our wedding day. It was an antique from my grandmother.
"I found this tangled in the rusted chain-link fence at the edge of the shipping docks," Marcus said, holding the silver beads out to Lorenzo. "It was covered in mud. I kept it hidden all these years because I didn't want you to know your father died a coward, running from his debts."
Lorenzo took the rosary, staring at the silver cross.
"He didn't die a coward," a new, feminine voice echoed from the dark end of the hallway.
We all spun around.
Stepping out of the shadows, illuminated only by the emergency exit sign, was Vanessa.
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She held a sleek, black handgun in her right hand, pointed directly at Marcus's chest.
"He didn't die a coward," Vanessa smiled, her eyes burning with a manic, vengeful light. "He died begging for his life. My father made sure of it."
