Chapter 7 - The Currency of Blood
Vane stepped into the van, the mud from his boots staining the pristine gray carpet of the mobile office. He didn't raise his shotgun. Instead, he reached down, grabbed Marcus by the lapels of his expensive silk jacket, and dragged him out of the chair, slamming him against the bank of server monitors. The glass of mineral water shattered against the floorboards.
"You told me my father signed the relinquishment form, Marcus," Vane whispered, his face less than an inch from the older man’s. "You told me he took ten million dollars and left me in the clinic to die."
Marcus chuckled, a thin trickle of blood appearing at the corner of his mouth where the silk jacket had cut into his lip. "He would have, Julian. If I had offered it to him. Your father was a Harlow. He cared about the stock price and the prestige of the north side docks. A sick boy with a damaged lung line? You would have been an embarrassment to the brand. I did you a favor. I gave you a life where strength was the only currency that mattered."
"He's lying, Julian," Eliza's voice cut through the rain as she stepped into the rear entrance of the van. She held Oliver by the hand, her face streaked with soot and water, but her posture as steady as it had been when she defended her family in the old house. She held out the flash drive. "The real files are here. Our father didn't sign anything. Marcus had him poisoned in his study three days after you disappeared from the nursery. The transfer documents were signed by a dead man's pen."
Marcus’s eyes shifted to the flash drive in Eliza's hand, a tiny glint of genuine greed flickering behind his calculated exterior. "The drive is useless without my biometric signature, Mrs. Harlow. You can expose the syndicate to the federal prosecutors if you like, but the moment you do, the Harlow Trust is frozen under the RICO statute. Your houses, your accounts, your son's trust fund... everything disappears into the state treasury. You'll be just as poor as the trash your mother's sister raised in the south yards."
Damian stepped into the van behind Eliza, his Walther PPK pointed directly at Marcus’s right knee. "We don't care about the money, Marcus. We care about the ledger. Unlock the terminal."
"And if I say no?" Marcus sneered. "Are you going to shoot me, Damian? If my heart rate goes above one hundred and eighty or drops below sixty, the satellite array triggers a hard wipe. You'll have nothing but an empty piece of plastic."
Oliver looked up from Eliza's side, his eyes wide as he looked at the elegant man in the silk suit who had caused so much terror in their lives. "Daddy... his watch is blinking."
Damian looked down at Marcus’s wrist. There, beneath the gold cufflink, was a specialized medical monitor tracking his pulse. The numbers were glowing in bright red LED: 72 bpm.
"He's right, Marcus," Damian said, a slow, terrifying smile spreading across his face. "Your heart rate is perfectly steady. Which means you think you're still in control. Let's see what happens to that pulse when we change the environment."
Damian grabbed the steel chain connecting Marcus’s wrist to the computer case. With one violent wrench of his massive arm, he tore the mounting brackets straight out of the aluminum desk, dragging Marcus toward the open rear doors of the van.
"Julian," Marcus cried out, his voice finally cracking as his boots dragged through the gravel outside. "Julian, stop him! I am the only father you have ever known!"
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Vane looked at the man who had raised him to be a ghost. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the old silver lighter Marcus had given him when he killed his first target, and dropped it into the mud.
"My father died in his study thirty years ago," Vane said, his gray eyes turning away from the light. "Damian... take him to the river."
