Chapter 3 - The Leverage
I woke up the next morning to the smell of black coffee.
When I walked into the kitchen, Adrian was already awake, staring at his laptop screen. Spread across the marble island were printed photographs of Grant, documents with heavily redacted lines, and blueprints of Grant's downtown office building.
"How did you get this?" I asked, stunned.
"I made three phone calls last night," Adrian said without looking up. "Evie, you told me Grant manages high-net-worth portfolios. Have you ever actually looked at his client list?"
I shook my head. "I'm a financial analyst for a retail firm. He kept his work entirely separate. He said his clients valued absolute discretion."
Adrian turned the laptop toward me. "They value discretion because half of them are laundering money through shell corporations. Grant isn't a brilliant investor, Evie. He's a washing machine. He cleans dirty money for syndicates operating out of the East Coast."
My blood ran cold. "That's what he meant by connections."
"Exactly. He threatened you with the shadows of worse men," Adrian said, taking a sip of his coffee. "But here is the beautiful irony of Grant's position. The people he works for do not tolerate instability. They do not tolerate police attention, scandals, or messy domestic disputes. If they realize Grant is a liability..."
"...they'll destroy him," I finished, the realization dawning on me.
Suddenly, my burner phone—a prepaid device Adrian had given me—buzzed.
Adrian frowned. He hadn't given the number to anyone. He nodded for me to answer it.
"Hello?" I said, my voice trembling.
"Did you really think a new phone would keep me out, Evie?" Grant's voice slithered through the speaker, calm and terrifyingly even. "I pay for the data tracing software your company uses. It took my tech guy ten minutes to ping your uncle's rental car GPS."
I froze.
"You have until noon to walk through our front door," Grant continued. "If you aren't home by 12:01, I'm going to make a phone call. Your father has a pacemaker, Evie. It would be a shame if the stress of a sudden foreclosure on his house caused a malfunction. I hold the deed to their secondary mortgage. I can call the loan in today."
He hung up.
I dropped the phone, panic seizing my throat. "Adrian... he's going after my parents. He has their mortgage. He can ruin them."
Adrian didn't blink. He reached into his jacket, pulled out his own encrypted phone, and dialed a number.
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"It's Adrian," he said quietly into the receiver. "Initiate Protocol Blue in Asheville. Secure the Vance residence. Pay off the secondary mortgage through the holding company, and relocate the parents to the Florida safehouse. Do it in the next hour."
He hung up and looked at me, a dangerous glint in his eye. "Grant thinks he's playing chess. He doesn't realize the board has already been flipped."
