Chapter 4 - THE GHOST IN THE WAREHOUSE
The downtown warehouse district was a graveyard of brick and steel after nine o'clock at night. The rain had washed the streets empty, leaving only the amber glow of streetlamps reflecting in the deep puddles.
I pulled my car into the narrow alley behind the Callahan Supply building and killed the headlights.
My hands were shaking as I pulled the brass key from my pocket. Brent was currently sitting in my warm dining room, drinking expensive wine with Victor Vance and Sierra, celebrating my removal. He assumed I was crying into a pillow at my sister’s house.
He had deeply underestimated how much I had learned from my father.
I slipped out of the car, pulled my hood up against the freezing rain, and hurried to the heavy steel service door at the rear of the loading dock. The brass key slid into the lock perfectly. With a heavy, satisfying clack, the deadbolt turned.
I stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind me.
The cavernous warehouse was pitch black, smelling of cardboard, metallic shelving, and cold dust. I didn't dare turn on the overhead lights. I pulled out my phone, using the dim screen to navigate the labyrinth of towering pallets holding commercial ovens, walk-in freezer panels, and industrial mixers.
Three million dollars of inventory. The lifeblood of the company I had built from the ground up while Brent was busy playing the visionary.
I made my way to the glass-walled manager’s office on the mezzanine level. I knew Brent kept a secondary safe under the desk here—one he thought I didn't know the combination to. He used it for petty cash and old vendor contracts.
I knelt under the desk, illuminating the dial with my phone.
34-12-58.
Our wedding anniversary, followed by the year he founded the company. Brent was predictably sentimental about himself.
The safe beeped and swung open.
Inside, there was no petty cash. Instead, there were three thick manila envelopes.
I pulled the first one open. It was a stack of invoices from a shell company called Apex Solutions. I had never authorized payments to Apex, yet millions of dollars had been funneled to them over the past year.
I opened the second envelope. It contained a dossier—background checks, financial profiles, and private investigator reports.
But the target of the investigation wasn't a corporate rival.
It was my father. Russell Avery.
Someone had been tracking my father’s banking movements, his health records, and the vulnerabilities in his real estate trust.
My breath caught in my throat. I tore open the third envelope.
Inside was a delicate, silver pocket watch.
I stared at it, my heart dropping into my stomach. It was my grandfather’s watch. My father had given it to Brent on the day Poppy was born, a gesture of welcoming him fully into the Avery legacy. Brent had claimed he lost it at a golf course two months ago.
Wrapped around the silver chain was a handwritten note on thick, cream-colored stationary.
Brent—This watch is proof of his trust in you. Use it to leverage the final loan from Vance. Once the company is mine, you’ll get your cut. —S.
Sierra.
The reversal hit me like a physical blow. Sierra Alden wasn't a mistress looking for a wealthy husband. She was a corporate spy. Victor Vance had planted her in Brent’s life to seduce him, manipulate his ego, and convince him to bankrupt his own company so Vance could swoop in and steal the Avery family assets hidden within it.
Brent wasn't the mastermind. Brent was a useful, arrogant idiot.
Suddenly, the heavy steel door on the ground floor echoed through the silent warehouse.
CLANG.
I froze, instantly clicking off my phone screen. The office plunged into absolute darkness.
Footsteps echoed on the concrete floor below. Heavy, deliberate boots. And they weren't alone.
“Check the loading docks,” a gruff male voice echoed up to the mezzanine. “Vance wants the inventory loaded into our trucks by midnight. If Callahan’s wife shows up to make a scene, deal with her quietly.”
Victor Vance hadn't waited for the dinner to conclude. He had sent a removal crew to strip the warehouse tonight, effectively stealing the inventory before the legal foreclosure could be contested in court.
I backed away from the desk, my heart hammering violently. I was trapped on the mezzanine. The only staircase down led directly to the main floor where Vance’s thugs were spreading out.
“Hey!” one of the men shouted from below. “The manager’s office door is open. Someone is up there.”
The beam of a high-powered flashlight swept across the glass walls of the office, illuminating the space.
I dropped flat onto the floor, clutching the silver watch and the envelopes to my chest.
Heavy boots began marching up the metal stairs.
I looked around desperately. The office had no other exit, save for a narrow air ventilation grate near the floorboards behind a row of filing cabinets.
I had thirty seconds before the door opened.
I scrambled behind the cabinets, silently unscrewing the loose thumb-screws of the vent cover. As the office door handle turned, I slipped backward into the dark, dusty ventilation shaft, pulling the metal grate back into place just as the flashlight beam cut across the floor where I had been kneeling.
“Nothing up here,” the thug called out, his boots stomping just inches from my face. “Must have been the wind.”
I held my breath, terrified that the loud thudding of my heart would give me away.
I had the proof of Sierra’s espionage. I had the proof of the shell companies. But as I lay in the dark, cramped shaft, I realized something terrifying.
The master ledger—the digital flash drive containing the cryptographic keys to all of our vendor accounts—wasn't in the safe.
There was only one place Brent would have hidden it. The one place he thought I would never look because it was too painful.
May you like
He had hidden it in the nursery.
I had to go back to the house. Tonight. While Vance and Sierra were sitting in my dining room.
