Chapter 6 - The Ring
I dropped Nikolai back onto the floor like a sack of dead weight.
My hand instinctively moved to the small gold band resting on the pinky finger of my left hand—the ring I had worn every single day since the morning I married my wife, Clara, ten years ago.
It was a simple, vintage band made of white gold, engraved on the interior surface with our initials and the date of our wedding. When the fire tore through our house in Idaho two years ago, Clara’s body had been recovered from the master bedroom, burned beyond recognition. The coroner’s report had confirmed her identity through dental records and the melted remnants of her matching gold band found in the debris.
My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped beast.
“Viktor,” I shouted, my voice cracking for the first time in years. “Search his desk! Search everything!”
Viktor immediately began tearing open the drawers of the mahogany desk, throwing papers, cash, and passports onto the floor. In the bottom drawer, hidden beneath a false lining, he pulled out a small, velvet-lined jeweler’s box.
He handed it to me.
My fingers were shaking as I flipped the brass latch open.
Inside the box lay a single white-gold wedding band.
I picked it up with trembling fingers. I held it under the light of the desk lamp, turning it over to inspect the inner surface.
Engraved in faint, elegant cursive script were six characters:
C & J - 10.14.16
It was Clara’s ring.
The ring that was supposed to have been destroyed in the fire that killed her and my daughter.
I stared at the metal, my vision blurring, the ambient noise of the rain outside fading into a high-pitched, roaring white noise in my ears.
“How did you get this?” I roared, grabbing Nikolai by his throat and slamming his head back against the concrete wall. “WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?!”
Nikolai choked, his eyes bulging as he struggled for air beneath my grip. “She... she gave it to me...” he gasped out.
I froze.
The room seemed to tilt on its axis.
“What did you say?” I whispered, my grip loosening slightly.
“Clara...” Nikolai wheezed, a bloody grin breaking across his scarred face once more. “She didn't die in Idaho, Hale. She planned the fire. She took the black ledger... she sold your shipping codes to my family... and then she walked away with forty million dollars of your offshore funds.”
The world stopped spinning. It simply collapsed into total, blinding darkness.
“You’re lying,” I breathed.
“Check... check the ledger page on the table,” Nikolai coughed, pointing a blood-stained finger toward the manila folder sitting on the desk.
I turned slowly, my hand letting go of his throat. I picked up the manila folder and opened it.
Inside was the page ripped from my black ledger.
At the bottom of the page, where the owner’s signature was required to authorize the release of the syndicate's hidden reserves, was a signature written in elegant, flowing blue ink.
It wasn't my signature.
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It was Clara’s.
And right beside her signature was a small, hand-drawn star—the exact same seven-pointed star that was tattooed on the back of Nikolai’s hand.
