Chapter 11 - The Name in Thomas’s Final Warning
The smoke smelled wrong.
Not fire. Chemical fog.
Samuel pulled his jacket over his mouth and moved toward the sealed door. One investigator struck the emergency release with a flashlight while the other searched the walls for a secondary exit.
Meredith’s eyes burned. Thomas’s letter remained clenched in her hand, the final sentence repeating in her mind.
Do not trust Samuel Price.
Samuel shouted through the door. “Whoever is outside, this room is monitored. You will be recorded.”
No answer came.
The ventilation fan roared harder.
Meredith staggered toward the cabinets. If Thomas had built a hidden archive, he would have built a private escape route. He trusted no one, not even his own security systems.
She ran her hands along the wall behind the safe.
A metal seam.
“Here.”
The investigator forced a crowbar into it. A narrow panel opened onto a utility tunnel barely wide enough for one person.
They crawled through darkness as smoke followed.
The tunnel ended behind the mansion’s old laundry room. Meredith emerged coughing, knees scraped, lungs aching.
Lily was nowhere in sight.
“Mara!” Meredith shouted.
A uniformed officer ran from the kitchen. “The child is safe. She is with your mother in the east sitting room.”
Meredith crossed the hallway at a run.
Lily sat curled in an armchair beneath a blanket. Evelyn knelt beside her. Mara stood near the window, pale and rigid.
Meredith dropped to her knees and held Lily.
“I’m okay,” Lily whispered. “Grandma closed the vents upstairs.”
Meredith looked at Evelyn. “Who locked us in?”
“I saw Daniel on the security screen near the nursery. Then the cameras went dark.”
Samuel entered behind her, coughing. Evelyn stared at him with open suspicion.
Meredith unfolded Thomas’s letter.
“Why did Dad tell me not to trust Samuel?”
The room shifted.
Samuel’s expression did not change, but Mara looked away.
Meredith noticed.
“Mara?”
“I don’t know,” Mara said too quickly.
Samuel closed the sitting-room doors. “Thomas distrusted me because I refused to merge Hale Strategic’s legal department with the Vale family office. He considered any independent adviser a threat.”
“That may be true,” Meredith said. “But he named you specifically after warning that Daniel was out of control.”
Evelyn stood. “Samuel worked for Thomas before he worked for you.”
Meredith turned to him.
“For how long?”
Samuel removed his glasses. “Eight months.”
“You told me you met my father only through company negotiations.”
“I simplified the history.”
“You lied.”
“Yes.”
Lily tightened her arms around Meredith.
Samuel continued, “Thomas hired me when I was twenty-nine to review overseas entities. I discovered irregular payments connected to Vale Chemical. When I questioned them, Daniel had me dismissed.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because when you hired me years later, I wanted the position judged on my work, not on my history with your father.”
“That is not enough.”
“No. It isn’t.”
An investigator entered holding a tablet. “We recovered exterior footage. Someone wearing a lodge security jacket entered through the west service door. Face obscured. They used an access card assigned to Samuel Price.”
Everyone looked at Samuel.
He frowned. “My access card was in my wallet.”
He checked.
The wallet was there.
The card was not.
Meredith remembered Samuel lying injured in the shed, paramedics cutting his shirt, officers moving around him. Anyone could have taken it.
Or he could have given it away.
The investigator continued, “The archive lock was triggered from Samuel’s mobile device.”
“That is impossible,” Samuel said.
“Your device is registered to the system.”
“I never knew the archive system existed.”
Meredith looked at his phone. “Give it to them.”
Samuel handed it over without hesitation.
A second officer called from the hall. “We found something.”
Near the nursery door lay the black metal box Natalie had taken. The environmental records were still inside.
On top rested a typed note.
MEREDITH,
ASK SAMUEL WHO PAID FOR HIS SISTER’S SURGERY.
Samuel read it and went still.
Meredith’s voice became quiet. “Who paid?”
He sat down.
“Thomas.”
“When?”
“Ten years ago.”
“Why?”
May you like
Samuel looked toward Lily, then back at Meredith.
“Because I found the first report suggesting Adrian’s brakes were cut.”
