Chapter 4 - The Blue Print and the Berth
The silence that followed was so absolute I could hear the antique grandfather clock ticking away the seconds in the hallway outside.
"Why are you telling me this?" I whispered, tears finally breaking free, burning hot trails down my cold cheeks. "If my husband discovered something illegal, if he was murdered—why bring me into your study to tell me? Are you threatening me? Are you going to make sure I disappear too?"
Gabriel looked down at me, his gaze softening by a fraction—just enough to let me see the cold, calculated fury burning beneath the surface.
"I don't kill cleaning staff, Martha," he said, his voice hard as iron. "And I don't tolerate rats running my company while I'm looking the other way. For the last three years, I believed Nolan Pierce when he told me our internal auditing department was clean. I believed him when he said Thomas Fontaine was stealing from the petty cash drawer before he died."
"Nolan," I breathed. The squeaking shoe. The slick smile.
"Nolan runs my terminal operations," Gabriel said, walking back to the window and staring out into the grey fog. "He’s been with the company for fifteen years. He knows every dock worker, every union boss, and every customs official from here to Gary, Indiana. But he doesn't own Rourke Freight. I do."
He turned back around, holding up Thomas’s blue notebook.
"Your daughter handed me the smoking gun," Gabriel said. "On page eighty-two, Thomas drew a complete schematic of the security camera blind spots at Berth 14, paired with a ledger entry showing that five million dollars in unaccounted weapons cargo cleared customs under Nolan’s personal authorization code exactly twelve hours before your husband’s car went off the expressway."
He stepped closer, closing the distance between us until I could see the tiny silver threads woven into the fabric of his white shirt.
"Thomas knew he was dead," Gabriel said. "So he hid the real ledger inside a child's drawing book and left it where he knew it would eventually be found—in his home, with his family. He trusted that someone in this house would care enough to look."
"What do you want from me?" I asked, my voice barely audible.
"I want you to keep doing your job," Gabriel said smoothly. "Clean the rooms. Wash the linen. Pour the coffee. And when Nolan Pierce walks into this library tomorrow morning to deliver his weekly logistics report, you’re going to be the one who brings in the tray."
"I'm a maid, Mr. Rourke. I don't play corporate games."
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"You play whatever game keeps your daughter alive," Gabriel replied, his eyes locking onto mine with terrifying clarity. "Because if Nolan figures out that Thomas’s notebook is in my safe, you and Lucy won't make it off Ashland Avenue before the first sleet turns to ice. Do we understand each other?"
I nodded slowly, the terror freezing the words in my throat.
