Chapter 152: Folders

Cecilia

I've never wanted to dwell on that memory—the kind that sits in the back of your mind like a splinter you can't quite dig out.

But now, with Ronan standing in front of me, it all comes rushing back whether I want it to or not.

The boy was Daniel. The girl was me.

He looked directly at me, and I saw something that might have been recognition, might have been guilt flickering across his face before he could hide it.

"I looked at the surveillance footage of you being brought in," he said, his voice rough like the words were scraping against his throat. "And I saw—"

He stopped, swallowing hard enough that I could see his Adam's apple bob. For a second, he looked like he might actually throw up, and honestly? I wouldn't have blamed him.

"You looked so much like that little girl in the photo Evelyn used to show me," he continued, quieter now. "Older, of course, but the same eyes. And I thought—fuck, this is her daughter."

The air felt too thick suddenly, like I was breathing through cotton. My mind was scrambling to connect the dots, to make sense of what he was saying.

"So you let me go," I said, my voice coming out steadier than I felt. "You're the one who had them dump me in that district instead of bringing me to the manor."

God, I'd always wondered about that. Why they'd just left me there like trash on the curb instead of finishing whatever the hell they'd started.

Ronan nodded, and I could see the weight of it in his shoulders, the way he seemed to fold in on himself just a little.

"I told my father's men that there'd been a mistake, that they'd grabbed the wrong target, that the woman wasn't who we were looking for. Ordered them to leave you somewhere you'd be found but not killed."

Ronan said simply. "I owed to Evelyn. Her daughter deserved better than to end up another victim of the Grey family's cruelty. And—"

He stopped, his expression shifting into something that looked almost like relief. "And it gave me an excuse to finally be free."

He reached into his jacket pocket—slowly, carefully, his movements telegraphed so the security personnel wouldn't react—and pulled out a small external hard drive.

"This is what I came to give you. Everything the Grey family has done for the past thirty years. Every crime, every victim, every piece of evidence that would have been destroyed if I'd left it at the manor."

He held it out toward me, and I found myself reaching for it automatically, my fingers closing around the cool metal casing. "Why?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. "Why give this to us? Why betray your own family?"

Ronan's smile was bitter, self-deprecating. "Because they're not my family. Not really. They're monsters wearing human skin, and I've spent my entire life pretending to be one of them, playing the role of dutiful heir while hating every second of it. This—"

He gestured at the hard drive now in my hand.

"This is my chance to finally do something right. To make sure that what happened to Evelyn, what happened to you, what's happened to countless others—that it all means something. That there are consequences."

He took a step back, his posture straightening slightly. "I should go. I've said what I came to say, given you what I came to give. What you do with that information is up to you, but—"

He paused, his eyes finding mine one more time. "I hope you destroy them. I hope you take everything they've built and burn it to the ground. They deserve nothing less."

"Wait," I said, stopping him before he could turn away. "What about you? What happens to you now?"

Ronan's smile turned genuine for the first time since he'd entered the room. "I disappear. Change my name, start over somewhere they'll never find me. I've been planning this for years. Now I'm just—someone else. Someone who gets to choose his own path for the first time in his life."

He inclined his head slightly, a gesture that was almost a bow. "Thank you, Miss Locke. For giving me the excuse I needed to finally break free. I hope—I hope you find the justice you're looking for. For yourself and for our mother."

Then he was gone, escorted out by the security personnel, leaving Arthur and me alone with the hard drive.

I stared at it for a long moment, this small piece of technology that held so much weight, so much potential for justice or revenge or whatever you wanted to call it.

"Ceci," Arthur said quietly, and when I looked up at him I saw understanding in his eyes, saw that he knew exactly what I was thinking, what I was planning to do. "You don't have to look at it right now. You can rest, recover, deal with this later when you're—"

"I need to see it," I interrupted, my voice firm despite the exhaustion pulling at me. "Arthur, I need to know. I need to see what they did, what they've been doing all these years. I need—"

"I know," he said, and there was resignation in his voice, acceptance that I was going to do this regardless of his concerns. "Alright. But the second it gets to be too much, we stop. Agreed?"

"Agreed," I said, already reaching for my laptop that someone—probably Arthur—had brought from wherever they'd been keeping my things.

The hard drive connected with a soft click, and I pulled up the file directory, my heart pounding as I took in the sheer volume of data Ronan had collected.

Folders organized by year, by type of crime, by victim—decades of documentation that the Grey family had apparently kept as some kind of twisted record of their activities.

I opened the first folder, dated thirty years ago, and immediately wished I hadn't.

The images were clinical, detached—medical photographs of organs laid out on steel tables, each one labeled with a price and a buyer's code.

Children's faces stared out from ID photos, their eyes hollow and dead even though they were technically alive.

Shipping manifests that listed human beings like they were cargo, complete with weights and measurements and "condition" ratings.

My stomach turned, bile rising in my throat, but I forced myself to keep looking, to scroll through file after file of evidence that proved exactly what the Grey family had been doing all these years.

Organ trafficking. Child trafficking. Forced labor. Sexual exploitation. Murder for hire. Money laundering.

Every crime imaginable, documented with the kind of meticulous record-keeping that suggested they'd never believed they could be caught, never thought there would be consequences for any of it.

Arthur frowned. "This is—this is enough to put them away forever. Multiple life sentences, no possibility of parole."

I nodded, unable to speak past the lump in my throat as I continued scrolling.

That's when I saw it.

A file labeled simply "Hostages—Already escaped," dated 15 years ago. I opened it, my eyes scanning the document that appeared—a list of names, dates, brief notes about circumstances of capture.

And there, halfway down the list: Audrey Rose, an American, wife of Victor Rose, mother of Sophia Rose. Captured June 2010. Subject showed significant psychological trauma. Escaped with the help of an unknown figure August 2010.