Chapter 30 - room 914
Nora did not go alone.
Grace entered the hotel through the main lobby while private security used the service stairs. Owen tracked the key card and discovered it had opened Room 914 twice during the previous hour.
Malcolm called Nora as she reached the ninth floor.
“Celeste is missing.”
“I know.”
“Did Elias take her?”
“Why would you think Elias is involved?”
“Because Gideon told me.”
Nora stopped outside the room.
“You still believe him?”
“I believe he knows more than either of us.”
“That has always been the problem. You confused knowledge with loyalty.”
Nora ended the call and opened the door.
The room was empty.
A lamp had been overturned, a glass broken and Celeste’s handbag left on the bed. The scene looked violent, but nothing else had been disturbed.
Grace examined the carpet.
“There are no signs anyone was dragged from the room.”
A camera rested inside the wardrobe, pointed toward the bed.
Its memory card contained a recording made that morning.
Celeste appeared on the screen alone.
“If Nora is watching this, Gideon has followed the path I prepared,” she said. “The disappearance is staged. I needed him to believe I still possess the original ledger.”
She held up a blue folder.
“The folder he is searching for contains copies. The true record is hidden in the house where Malcolm first asked Nora to marry him.”
Nora knew the place immediately.
Before the mansion, private jets and corporate apartments, she and Malcolm had lived in a narrow brick townhouse on Bell Street.
They had kept it as a rental property for decades.
Celeste continued.
“Elias told me the house has never been searched because Malcolm believes nothing important happened before he became powerful.”
The video ended with a knock on the hotel door.
Celeste looked toward it, suddenly frightened.
A man’s voice spoke from the corridor.
“Nora will never reach Bell Street.”
May you like
The voice did not belong to Gideon.
It belonged to Owen.
