Chapter 5 - The Unseen Enemy
That evening, I called a private meeting in the ground-floor security suite with Marcus, my head of security. The monitors flickered with live feeds of the perimeter gates, the long winding driveway, and the dimly lit corridors.
“Dig into the background of Clara Reed again,” I ordered, sliding a file across the steel table. “Dig deeper than standard HR files. Find out who else knew about Rose Reed. Find out if anyone financed her apartment in the city before she applied here.”
Marcus raised an eyebrow, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. “Mr. Hale, you suspect she’s planted? By whom? The board?”
“I don't know yet,” I replied, staring at a camera feed of the east wing where Mother's room was located. “My father had enemies dating back thirty years. Men who lost millions when he consolidated shipping routes in the nineties. If someone knows Clara is Victor Hale’s daughter, she’s not just a domestic worker anymore. She’s a target.”
“I’ll double the detail outside her quarters,” Marcus said, standing up.
“Quietly,” I warned. “If she realizes she’s being watched like a prisoner, she’ll bolt. And God help us, my mother would probably pack her bags and leave with her.”
The investigation yielded results within forty-eight hours, but they weren't the results I expected.
Marcus knocked on my office door late Thursday night, sliding a fresh manila folder onto my desk. “You were right to look closer, sir. But it wasn't a corporate rival who knew about Clara. It was someone much closer to home.”
I opened the folder. A photograph of a man stepped out at me. Older, silver-haired, impeccably tailored, stepping out of a private members' club in downtown Philadelphia.
“Julian Vance,” I read aloud. My father’s former business partner—and the man who had tried hostile takeovers of Hale Enterprises three separate times after my father’s passing.
“Vance’s legal team purchased the mortgage on Rose Reed’s apartment building six months ago,” Marcus explained, his voice low. “And according to our financial traces, someone deposited fifty thousand dollars into Clara’s mother's hospice care account right before she passed away. The wire came from an offshore shell company directly linked to Vance’s primary holding firm.”
May you like
A cold fury settled deep into my chest. Julian Vance hadn't just been playing corporate chess with me. He had been tracking my father’s old shadows, digging up forgotten secrets, positioning pawns on the board long before I even knew a game was being played.
And Clara had walked right into the middle of it. She thought she was searching for her own history, but to a predator like Julian Vance, she was a loaded gun pointed directly at the heart of the Hale dynasty.
