Chapter 1

Chapter Nine:

The Enemy Within

Neither of us sat when the president told us to. He noticed and let it go, which somehow said more than if he had pushed the point.

“I know about the two of you.” That was all the opening he gave it. No warning shot before it, no chance to prepare a face to hear it with. I felt the silence stretch out after he said it and neither of us filled it, because filling it would have meant admitting what filling it would mean.

He kept talking into that silence like he expected nothing back. “This investigation was hanging by threads before either of you decided you had room in it for this. Now I have to wonder whether what you two are finding is the truth or just whatever the two of you want badly enough to see.” His attention swung fully onto him now, and his voice dropped low, the kind of low that carried more weight than shouting would have. “You are supposed to be chasing facts. Instead I am watching you chase the daughter of a man half this club still blames for getting three of ours killed.”

“My judgment is not the problem here.”

“Your judgment stopped being yours to trust the day you let this happen.” The president leaned across his desk, both forearms flat against the wood. “Whoever set Daniel Voss up is still out there. Still watching. A man thinking with anything other than his head gets people killed, and I have buried enough men already to know exactly what that looks like.”

“I am not leaving her.”

Four words, no space between them for argument. The president went quiet at that, sitting back into his chair slower than he had leaned forward, and for a second I thought he might actually change course.

He did not.

“Nobody told you to leave her.” His tone shifted without softening exactly, sliding sideways into something almost careful. “I told you to keep your head while you do whatever you are doing. Right now I do not think you can tell the difference between the two.”

I spoke up before he could keep going. “I want the truth. I do not care what it costs, or what it ends up saying about my father. Be angry about us if that is what you need to be. It changes nothing about why I am here.”

He studied me a long moment. Something behind his eyes that might have been respect if he had let it stay there any longer than it did.

“Then you should understand exactly what you are both sitting on top of.” He pulled a folder from the drawer at his knee and pushed it flat across the desk. Financial records, dated within the last six months, small transfers routed through three accounts before landing somewhere that traced, eventually, back to someone still drawing a paycheck from this club right now.

“Whoever buried the truth three years ago is still burying it,” he said. “That does not happen by accident. That happens because somebody currently sitting at our dinner table wants it to stay buried.”

He went through the numbers with his jaw working the whole way, quiet until he set the last page down.

“This is fresh. Whoever did this has not stopped doing it.”

“No,” the president said. “They have not.”

That night I finally went through the box of my father’s things I had put off opening for three years, and taped to the underside of a jewelry box my mother had kept without ever knowing what sat beneath the lining, I found an envelope with my name written across the front in his hand. It was dated to the week before he disappeared.

Inside sat a single key and three lines. If you are reading this, something happened to me before I got the chance to tell you myself. The key opens a box at First Fidelity downtown, filed under your mother’s maiden name. Trust whatever you find there over anyone who tells you a different version.

My hands would not hold steady carrying it to him.

“He left this for me. Not the club. Not anyone here. Me specifically.”

He read the note twice through, turning the key over between his fingers like the metal itself might have more to say than the paper did.

“He knew something might happen to him, and he built a way around it. A way for you to find this even if he never got the chance to tell you himself.”

“I was the only one who could have opened it. He made sure of that on purpose.”

He looked at me differently after that, something behind his expression I had not seen from him before, heavier than anything either of us had carried through this whole investigation up to now.

“That makes you the piece nobody accounted for. Not just his daughter. The one person whoever did this never planned around.”

We left before the sun was fully up the next morning, quiet through most of the drive, the key sitting in my coat pocket like it had put on weight overnight. First Fidelity opened at nine sharp. We sat in the parking lot from eight forty on, neither of us saying much, both of us watching the doors.

The teller pulled the box without asking many questions once I handed over the key and my mother’s old identification. Inside waited more of what we already knew how to recognize by now, ledgers, photographs, and underneath all of it a second recording. My father’s voice on this one sounded older than the one from the garage, tired in a way the first tape had not caught yet, and this time he said a name outright instead of circling around it the way he had before.

We sat in the car afterward with the engine idling, neither one of us reaching to say anything, the weight of that one name settling into the space between us like something physical.

My phone rang before either of us broke the quiet.

An unknown number. I nearly let it ring out, some instinct telling me to answer it anyway before the second ring finished.

Static filled the line first. Then a voice neither of us recognized, unhurried, far too calm for the words that followed it.

“You should have left the past buried where it was. The both of you.” A pause long enough to feel intentional. “Everyone who has been helping you two is already in more danger than either of you realizes.”

The call ended before I could say a single word back.