Chapter 4 - A Ledger Written in Lies
Elias did not answer his fiancée for nearly ten agonizing seconds.
He looked down at Willa, whose lips had turned a faint shade of blue, then looked back at Sloan Prescott.
“You came down here to protect her?” Elias asked softly.
“Of course I did!” Sloan said, her voice rising in theatrical desperation.
“Willa was selling container manifests to the Morretti syndicate across the bay.”
“I caught her copying files, and when I confronted her, she tried to run.”
“I told security to detain her in the carriage house for questioning, but these two animals must have taken it upon themselves to drag her down here!”
Elias did not look at the two unconscious men lying in the puddles.
He bent down, slid his arms beneath Willa’s shivering frame, and lifted her effortlessly against his chest.
Her head fell against his shoulder, her wet hair soaking into his shirt.
“Elias, she is a traitor to this family!” Sloan stepped forward, blocking the narrow threshold.
“Out of my way, Sloan,” Elias said.
His voice was not raised; it was flat, carrying the cold authority of an executioner.
Sloan stepped aside, her knuckles turning white inside her coat pockets.
Elias carried Willa out of the rotting boathouse, up the stone steps of the overgrown cove trail, and into the rear entrance of the manor.
He did not summon the household staff.
He carried her directly into the private medical suite in the east wing, where a private physician was on twenty-four-hour retainer.
Within twenty minutes, Willa was wrapped in heated thermal blankets, an intravenous saline drip warming her veins.
Dr. Marcus, an elderly man who had patched up Baron soldiers for three decades, finished bandaging her wrists.
“She has mild hypothermia and superficial contusions, Elias,” the doctor reported quietly.
“Another ten minutes in that barrel and her heart would have stopped from the shock.”
Elias stood beside the window, staring out into the rain with a glass of unpoured whiskey in his hand.
“Keep her monitored. Nobody enters this wing without my direct word.”
The doctor nodded and stepped out into the hallway, closing the heavy mahogany door.
Willa opened her eyes, the warmth slowly returning to her stiff fingers.
Elias turned from the window and pulled a leather armchair up to the side of her bed.
He sat down, resting his elbows on his knees, his gray eyes boring into hers.
“You told me she ordered it.”
Willa swallowed, her throat raw and dry.
“She took my phone from my hands at the docks, Mr. Baron.”
“She told those men to take me somewhere out of sight and get it out of me.”
Elias leaned back, his jaw tight.
“Get what out of you, Willa?”
Willa took a deep, shaking breath.
“The photograph.”
“What photograph?”
“The September 2019 Norfolk manifest.”
Elias frowned, his brow furrowing in genuine confusion.
“Norfolk was an inactive terminal in 2019. We transferred all southern cargo through Richmond that year.”
“Not according to file fourteen in your audit crate,” Willa said softly.
“The manifest cleared eleven containers through Baltimore down to Norfolk on September fourteenth.”
“And who signed the clearance box?”
Willa looked directly into his eyes, refusing to flinch.
“Cecilia Baron.”
The air left Elias’s chest in an audible hiss.
The glass of whiskey on the side table rattled as his hand closed into an iron fist.
“Cecilia died on the fourth of April, 2019.”
“I know,” Willa whispered.
“Her signature was on October, November, and December manifests as well.”
“Every single one was signed in fresh blue fountain-pen ink.”
Elias stood up abruptly, pacing the length of the room like a caged panther.
“Sloan told me your phone was destroyed during your arrest.”
Willa reached beneath the thermal blanket, lifting her trembling right arm.
“I worked for corporate lawyers for three years, Mr. Baron.”
“I don't trust phones.”
“Every document I scan automatically routes through an encrypted Swiss cloud partition.”
Elias stopped pacing.
He walked over to the desk in the corner of the medical suite and opened his secure personal laptop.
He swung the screen toward her and slid the keyboard over to the edge of the bed.
“Log into it.”
Willa typed her twenty-character alphanumeric key with stiff, trembling fingers.
The screen flashed green, revealing a minimalist folder structure containing hundreds of high-resolution document scans.
At the very top of the list, marked with yesterday's timestamp, was an image file labeled Manifest_NF_2019_09.
Elias leaned over the bed, his face inches from the screen.
He clicked the file.
The high-resolution photograph filled the monitor.
The bill of lading was crisp.
The container numbers were clearly visible.
And in the bottom right corner, looping with the unmistakable flourish of a private Swiss boarding school education, was his sister’s signature.
Elias stared at the screen for two full minutes without blinking.
A muscle in his jaw twitched with terrifying intensity.
“That is her hand,” he muttered, his voice barely a breath.
“That is not a forgery.”
Willa watched him closely.
“How can you be certain?”
Elias reached out and tapped the glass where the letter B met the final loop of the name.
“Cecilia broke her right index finger when she was eleven years old.”
“Whenever she finished a signature, she lifted the pen at a forty-five-degree angle, leaving a tiny dot of ink inside the upper loop.”
He pointed to the screen.
The microscopic ink dot was there, perfectly preserved in digital clarity.
May you like
“A dead girl cannot sign eleven shipping containers of port equipment,” Elias said, his voice dropping into a deadly whisper.
“Which means either my sister did not die seven years ago, or someone kept her alive until December of 2019.”
