Chapter 4 - The Shadow in the Mirror
Grant stared down at the small, blinking tracker on the concrete floor, his boot hovering inches above it. Every instinct screamed at him to crush it under his heel, to obliterate the tiny circuit board that was currently broadcasting his every move straight to Claire.
Instead, he slowly lowered his foot back down, his mind racing.
If he smashed it, she would know instantly that he had found it. If he left it, she would continue to watch him like a lab rat in a maze. But as he looked at the blinking green LED, a dark, calculating thought crept into his mind.
Let her watch.
If she was tracking the G-Wagon, she would assume he was still inside it, driving around Greenwich, panicking, trying to figure out his next move. It gave him an advantage—if he played it right.
Grant bent down, picked up the tracking beacon, and dropped it into the cup holder of his Aston Martin parked in the adjacent stall. Then, without a sound, he slipped back into the Mercedes, killed the headlights, and sat in total darkness for three long minutes, listening to the hum of the climate control system.
Once he was certain the coast was clear, he hit the manual override to close the garage door halfway, ducked under the heavy metal barrier, and walked out into the pouring rain toward the back gate of the estate.
He didn't take his phone. He left the burner phone in the study and his primary smartphone locked inside the glove box of the Mercedes. Let the trackers follow the car. Let Claire think he was spinning out of control inside his own home.
He needed to talk to someone who didn't have a stake in his marriage, someone who could help him trace where a seven-month-pregnant woman with elite technological skills and a mountain of corporate blackmail material could possibly vanish to in the tri-state area.
He needed Marcus Vance.
Marcus was Whitmore Urban Holdings' general counsel—a man whose loyalty was bought and paid for with a seven-figure salary and the quiet understanding that they both possessed enough secrets to put the other away for life.
Grant walked three blocks through the torrential downpour, his designer coat soaked through, his shoes ruined by the standing water pooling along the Greenwich sidewalks. By the time he reached the public payphone outside the commuter train station—an antique relic left over from a bygone era—his hair was plastered to his forehead and his teeth were slightly chattering.
He fed a handful of quarters into the slot, punched in Marcus’s private cell number, and waited through three long rings before a gruff, sleepy voice answered.
"This better be good," Marcus muttered, background noise indicating he was either at a late-night bar or his high-rise Manhattan penthouse. "Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"Marcus, listen to me very carefully," Grant said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "Claire is gone."
A pause on the other end. The background noise vanished instantly. "What do you mean, she's gone? It's Friday night."
"I mean she cleaned out the house, wiped the security servers, left my financial records on my desk, and vanished without a trace," Grant hissed, looking nervously over his shoulder at the empty street. "And she has a complete dossier on our off-shore accounts and the zoning kickbacks."
A sharp intake of breath hissed through the receiver. "An audit? How the hell did she get her hands on that? Those files are encrypted behind three layers of corporate firewall!"
"I don't know!" Grant snapped. "She cloned my security token. She's been playing me for six months while I was busy with Natalie. We need to find her, Marcus. Now. Before she drops those files to the federal prosecutor's office."
Marcus was silent for a moment, the gravity of the situation clearly settling over him. When he spoke again, his voice was dangerously cold. "If she has those files, Grant, we're not just looking at a messy divorce. We're looking at federal indictments, asset seizure, and twenty years in a maximum-security facility. Where is she?"
"I don't know where she is, but she's tracking my car," Grant said quickly. "I left the G-Wagon in the garage with a planted tracker. I'm calling from a burner payphone in town. I need you to meet me at the private airstrip in Bridgeport in forty minutes. Bring your laptop. We're going to pull her digital footprint from the cloud before she makes her next move."
" Bridgeport?" Marcus questioned. "Grant, are you out of your mind? In this weather?"
"Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a orange jumpsuit, Marcus?" Grant snarled. "Meet me at the hangar. Now."
Grant slammed the heavy metal coin return lever down, the sharp clack echoing off the brick wall of the train station. He turned around, pulling his coat collar up against the driving rain, and began walking toward the edge of town where he kept an unmarked corporate sedan parked in a secure municipal garage.
As he stepped around the corner of the station, the beam of a passing car’s headlights swept across the wet asphalt, illuminating a figure standing near the entrance of the dark alleyway ahead.
It was a woman holding a black umbrella, her silhouette sharp and elegant against the glare of the streetlamp.
Grant froze in his tracks.
The woman slowly lowered the umbrella. It wasn't Claire.
May you like
It was Natalie.
---
