Chapter 3 - The Library
The library on the ground floor of my estate was lined with five thousand leather-bound volumes, floor-to-ceiling walnut paneling, and heavy velvet drapes that blocked out the lights of the city below.
When I entered, Grace was sitting on a high-backed leather armchair near the unlit fireplace. Marcus stood six feet behind her, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes fixed on the back of her head. Amara had been taken to the upstairs nursery under the supervision of my head of security’s wife—a trusted woman who had raised three children of her own.
I walked over to the heavy mahogany desk, sitting down behind the blotter, and pulled a clean glass from the lower drawer. I poured two fingers of amber bourbon, took a slow sip, and set the glass down.
“Nikolai Voronov,” I said flatly.
Grace didn't look up. Her hands were folded tightly in her lap, her knuckles red, her nose swollen from crying.
“He told me if I didn't come here, he would kill her,” Grace whispered, her voice barely audible above the quiet hum of the room’s ventilation system.
“Start from the beginning, Grace,” I said. “And remember—I have two men currently pulling every scrap of data from your personal phone, your bank accounts, and your apartment in South Seattle. If I catch you in a single lie, this conversation ends, and my enforcement team takes over.”
Grace swallowed hard, her chest shaking as she raised her eyes to meet mine for the first time since she had been hired.
“My name isn't Grace Miller,” she admitted, her voice hollow. “My real name is Elena Voronova. Nikolai is my half-brother.”
I didn't react outwardly, but inside, a dark, lethal calculation snapped into place.
The Voronov bloodline. The family that had run the Northwest arm of the syndicate for thirty years.
“Go on,” I said.
“Four months ago, Nikolai found me,” Elena said, her words rushing out now like water from a broken dam. “I had severed ties with my family six years ago when I got pregnant with Amara. I wanted nothing to do with their business. I was working as a cook in a diner in Tacoma. Nikolai showed up at my apartment one night. He had two men with him.”
She reached up, wiping a stray tear from her cheek with her trembling hand.
“He told me that you had spent two years hunting his lieutenants,” Elena continued. “He said your intelligence team had completely shut down their shipping channels in Oregon and Washington. He knew he couldn't get a man past your perimeter security—your vetting process for bodyguards and intelligence officers is impossible to breach.”
“So he used a mother,” I deduced quietly.
“He gave me a choice,” Elena sobbed, her body shuddering. “He said I could either apply for the head housekeeper position at your estate using a clean, state-manufactured identity he had bought from a federal contact... or he would take Amara and sell her to a network in Eastern Europe.”
The air in the room became incredibly thin.
I leaned forward over the desk, resting my forearms on the wood. “What was your assignment here, Elena?”
“To watch you,” she whispered. “To report your schedule, the locations of your private safe rooms, the movements of your security detail, and... to find out if you had recovered the black ledger from your daughter’s estate in Idaho.”
My eyes narrowed into two slivers of black ice.
The black ledger.
When my family’s house was destroyed two years ago, my daughter’s room had been situated directly above my private subterranean vault. The vault had contained a physical, leather-bound ledger listing every bribed politician, port authority director, and federal judge across three states—a document that could dismantle every major crime family on the West Coast if it ever reached the Department of Justice.
I had assumed the ledger was incinerated in the blast.
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“Why does Nikolai think I have it?” I asked.
“Because two weeks ago,” Elena said, looking directly into my eyes with stark, terrified honesty, “Nikolai received a package in the mail. Inside was a single page ripped from that ledger... with your blood printed on the bottom corner.”
