Caleb refused to believe his uncle was trying to kill him.
At first.
“No,” he said.
The security footage was frozen on the library screen.
The unidentified man stood inside the private pharmacy, his face partly hidden by a baseball cap.
A time stamp glowed at the bottom.
2:17 a.m.
The code he used belonged to Dominic.
“That proves someone has his access code,” Caleb said.
“Or that he gave it to them.”
“He wouldn’t.”
I turned toward him.
“You said we follow evidence.”
“I said we find evidence.”
“This is evidence.”
“It is not proof.”
Victor sat silently across the room.
That worried me more than Caleb’s denial.
“Say something,” Caleb told him.
Victor looked at his son.
“What would you like me to say?”
“That Uncle Dom didn’t do this.”
Victor’s jaw tightened.
“I can’t.”
Caleb stared.
“You suspected him.”
“I suspected everyone.”
“Not the same thing.”
Victor stood.
“Do you believe suspicion is easy for me? These people ate at my table. Watched you grow up. Buried your sister beside us.”
Caleb’s expression changed.
His sister again.
That name seemed to touch a hidden nerve in the family.
“What does Sofia have to do with this?”
Victor looked away.
Caleb stood slowly.
“Father.”
I had never heard fear in his voice before.
“What does Sofia have to do with this?”
Victor walked toward the windows.
Eight years earlier, Sofia Romano had died when her car went through a barrier on a mountain road north of the city.
Police ruled it an accident.
Wet pavement.
Excessive speed.
No witnesses.
But Victor had never believed the report.
“Sofia called me forty minutes before the crash,” he said.
Caleb went completely still.
“You never told me that.”
“She was upset.”
“About what?”
Victor turned.
“She had discovered irregularities in one of our shipping companies.”
Dominic’s division.
My stomach tightened.
“What kind of irregularities?” I asked.
Victor answered without looking at me.
“Money was disappearing.”
Caleb shook his head.
“Uncle Dom had money.”
“People with money steal too.”
“How much?”
“Nearly eighty million dollars.”
Silence.
Victor continued.
“Sofia thought someone was laundering outside money through Romano ports without authorization.”
“Whose money?”
“We never learned.”
“And she died the same night?”
Victor nodded.
Caleb stumbled backward as if someone had struck him.
“You knew this for eight years?”
“I suspected.”
“You let me call it an accident.”
“I had no proof.”
“You let me defend him!”
Victor’s voice rose for the first time.
“I was trying to protect what was left of my family.”
Caleb laughed bitterly.
“You mean your empire.”
Victor looked wounded.
Astonishingly human.
“Sometimes,” he said quietly, “I no longer know the difference.”
Caleb left.
I found him forty minutes later in the old greenhouse behind the mansion.
Rainwater rattled over the glass roof.
He sat on a wooden bench surrounded by roses that hadn’t bloomed in months.
I sat beside him.
He didn’t look at me.
“I was driving behind Sofia that night.”
I waited.
“She wanted me to come with her to meet someone. I told her I had a date.”
His voice broke slightly.
“She laughed at me. Said I’d regret choosing a woman over my sister.”
“Caleb…”
“I saw her car turn north.”
“You didn’t cause what happened.”
“I could have been with her.”
“And then maybe both of you would have died.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Neither do you.”
He finally looked at me.
“What kind of hospice worker argues with grieving people?”
“The kind who hates useless guilt.”
For a moment, he almost smiled.
Then pain crossed his face.
Not emotional pain.
Physical.
His hand went to his chest.
“Caleb?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
His pulse was irregular.
I helped him back toward the house.
Halfway there, he collapsed.
This time no suspicious nurse was present.
No unknown medication.
Nothing had been administered for hours.
That scared me more.
Because poisoning had already done real damage.
At the hospital, an independent cardiologist delivered the news we had been avoiding.
Caleb’s heart had been injured.
Not irreversibly.
But seriously.
“If we remove the source of exposure,” the doctor said, “there is a reasonable possibility of recovery.”
Reasonable possibility.
Two words that transformed the room.
Caleb stared at him.
“You’re saying I may not be dying?”
“I’m saying I cannot find evidence of the terminal disease described in portions of your earlier medical record.”
Victor gripped the back of a chair.
“What?”
The doctor placed two files beside each other.
“These scans are supposed to belong to the same patient.”
He pointed.
“They do not.”
Silence.
Caleb’s face drained of color.
“Some of my records were falsified?”
“That appears possible.”
I thought of Dr. Vale.
The private pharmacy.
Dominic’s access code.
Fourteen months of everyone telling Caleb his body was failing naturally.
Fourteen months of treatment based on manipulated information.
Someone hadn’t merely tried to poison him.
They had constructed an entire terminal illness around him.
Why?
Victor answered before I asked.
“Control.”
Everyone turned toward him.
He looked suddenly older.
“If Caleb died, Romano Holdings would pass temporarily to Dominic.”
Caleb’s eyes closed.
“And if you died first?”
“Dominic would control everything immediately until your estate settled.”
There it was.
Money.
Power.
An empire.
The oldest motives in the world.
But one piece still didn’t fit.
“Why wait fourteen months?” I asked.
Victor looked at me.
“If Dominic wanted him dead, why not overdose him immediately?”
The doctor glanced toward Caleb.
“He may have needed the decline to look natural.”
Caleb shook his head.
“No.”
We looked at him.
“He needed me alive.”
I frowned.
“For what?”
Caleb stared toward the city lights beyond the hospital window.
“Signatures.”
Victor’s face went pale.
Over the previous year, Caleb had signed dozens of documents while heavily medicated.
Asset transfers.
Board authorizations.
Shipping agreements.
Insurance changes.
He barely remembered half of them.
By midnight, Romano attorneys were reviewing everything.
At 2:00 a.m., they found it.
A series of shell companies had acquired controlling stakes in three major Romano shipping subsidiaries.
The approvals contained Caleb’s signature.
Those shell companies ultimately led to a trust registered in the Cayman Islands.
The beneficiary was hidden.
But one attorney recognized the law firm.
Dominic had used it before.
Victor’s fury was terrifying.
He wanted Dominic brought to him immediately.
Caleb stopped him.
“No.”
“He poisoned you.”
“We still need proof.”
“He killed your sister.”
“We don’t know that.”
Victor slammed his fist against the wall.
“I know.”
“You suspect.”
“I am done suspecting!”
Caleb stood.
Weak.
Pale.
Still stubborn.
“No more people disappearing. No more fear solving every problem. If we do this your way, Dominic becomes another Romano rumor. I want him convicted.”
Victor stared at his son.
Then at me.
“This is you.”
I blinked.
“What?”
“He never cared about courts before you arrived.”
Caleb’s mouth twitched.
“She’s irritating.”
“I’ve noticed.”
For the first time, the three of us almost laughed.
It lasted three seconds.
Then my phone rang.
Unknown number.
I answered.
A woman whispered, “Lila Monroe?”
“Yes?”
“I know who poisoned your husband.”
My pulse jumped.
“Who is this?”
“My name is Mara Bennett.”
The missing nurse.
I stood.
“Where are you?”
“Victor’s men released me yesterday. I ran.”
“Why?”
“Because I remembered something.”
“What?”
Her breathing was uneven.
“The medication I gave Caleb the night he collapsed wasn’t from his normal package.”
I looked at Caleb.
“Where did it come from?”
“Dr. Vale brought it.”
My blood went cold.
“Can you prove that?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I photographed the package because the label looked wrong.”
“Send it to me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because somebody followed me.”
A noise sounded in the background.
Mara gasped.
“Where are you?”
She whispered an address.
Then screamed.
The line went dead.
Caleb was already reaching for his coat.
Victor stepped in front of him.
“You are not going anywhere.”
“She has evidence.”
“I’ll send men.”
“No.”
“Caleb.”
“If Dominic controls people inside our organization, we don’t know which men are his.”
Victor froze.
Caleb looked at me.
“We go ourselves.”
I should have said no.
I should have remembered the bullet at the wedding.
I should have remembered that I had known these people for less than a week.
Instead I grabbed my coat.
Twenty-five minutes later, Caleb and I entered an abandoned motel near Yonkers with two independent security contractors behind us.
Room 17 was open.
Mara was gone.
The room had been torn apart.
A lamp broken.
Mattress overturned.
Blood on the carpet.
But beneath the sink, taped exactly where a frightened woman might hide something in a hurry, we found her phone.
The photographs were still there.
Three images of Caleb’s medication package.
And one accidental photograph reflected in a mirror behind Dr. Vale.
A man standing beside him.
Dominic Romano.
I stared at the image.
Caleb said nothing.
Then another photograph caught my attention.
On Dominic’s wrist was a silver watch.
The same silver watch visible in an old police photograph from Sofia Romano’s accident scene.
A photograph showing an unidentified man standing behind the guardrail.
A witness.
A man who had told police he never saw Sofia that night.
Dominic hadn’t merely known about the crash.
He had been there.
Caleb’s hand started shaking.
And then a voice came from behind us.
“You should have left the phone where you found it.”
We turned.
Dr. Adrian Vale stood in the doorway.
A gun pointed directly at my chest.
---