Chapter 143 The Traitor
Kane hadn’t moved from the couch.
But the ease that had been in his posture minutes ago was gone.
He looked at Marcus.
“Show me.”
Marcus set a tablet on the coffee table and turned it to face them.
He pulled up a video file and pressed play.
The footage was grainy.
Low resolution, shot at an angle that suggested a camera that wasn’t supposed to be there.
A corridor Aria didn’t immediately recognize.
A door at the far end with a heavy bolt lock.
Then the door opened.
Not forced.Not broken.
Opened.
From the outside.
By someone who knew exactly where the lock was and how to work it.
The figure was male.
Dark clothing, face angled down and away from the camera.
He held the door open and stepped back, and a few seconds later, Amanda walked through it.
Like she had been expecting it.
The figure didn’t follow her.
He just watched her go, then pulled the door shut behind him.
The footage ended.
Kane’s jaw was tight.
“Where did you get this?”
“It wasn’t ours,” Marcus said.
“External source. A camera mounted on a building across the street caught the side exit. Whoever helped her didn’t know it was there.”
“Neither did we,” Kane said flatly.
“No. Neither did we.”
Aria stared at the frozen last frame.
The door. The empty corridor.
“Who is he?”
“Keep watching,” Marcus said.
But it was Maya who spoke next.
She had been standing slightly behind Marcus, arms crossed, her expression carrying the specific weight of someone who had been sitting on something uncomfortable for too long.
“I don’t understand,” Aria said, “What are we watching and why are we watching it?”
Maya took a breath.
“After Amanda and Jacob died, I was handling the cleanup. Making sure everything looked like accidents on the human side. Documentation, records, the usual.”
She paused.
“Devon came to find me while I was in the middle of it.”
Aria frowned.
“Devon was there?”
“He said he was checking in. That Kane had sent him.”
Maya’s eyes moved briefly to Kane.
Kane said nothing.
His expression told her everything.
“He hadn’t,” Maya continued. “I figured that out later. At the time I didn’t think much of it. We talked for a few minutes. And then, out of nowhere, he said something strange.”
She stopped.
“What did he say?” Aria asked.
“He said Emma was going to be devastated when she heard the news.”
The room was quiet.
Aria’s eyes sharpened.
“Emma.”
“That’s what I said,” Maya told her. “I didn’t react right away. I just filed it. But it kept coming back to me after he left.”
Aria sat forward.
“Emma is Devon’s niece.”
Maya looked at her steadily.
“Yes.”
“Why would Devon’s niece be devastated about Amanda’s death?”
“That’s exactly what I asked him,” Maya said.
“And he completely fell apart. Stumbled over his words, changed the subject, laughed it off. I let it go in the moment. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
She glanced at Marcus.
“So I told him.”
Marcus picked up without pause.
“I started looking into Amanda’s background. The parts we hadn’t bothered with because she was already dead.”
He let that land for a second.
“It turns out Amanda had a child. A daughter. About the same age as the twins. The record is incomplete, the father isn’t listed, and the child’s current whereabouts aren’t in any system we can access.”
Kane leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“Marcus.”
“I know.”
“These are disconnected pieces of information. A man we can’t identify on a camera. Devon making a strange comment. A child with no paper trail.”
His voice was controlled, but only just.
“Tell me where this is going.”
Marcus reached for the tablet again.
“Here,” he said.
He opened a second video.
This one was sharper, more recent by the timestamp in the corner.
An exterior shot, the side of a building Aria recognized as the east perimeter of the territory.
Devon was in it.
She almost didn’t understand what she was seeing at first.
Devon was alone.
He looked around once, twice, making sure the space was clear.
Then he picked up a loose piece of concrete from the ground, turned it over in his hand, and drove it into the side of his own head.
Aria’s hand came up to her mouth.
Devon staggered back against the wall.
Slid down it slowly.
Arranged himself against the base, head tilted, one arm thrown out at the right angle to suggest he had fallen there.
Then he waited.
Kane stood up.
He didn’t say anything.
He just stood, and the stillness in him was the most dangerous thing in the room.
“Why,” Aria said.
Her voice came out quieter than she intended.
“Why would he do that?”
“To create a story,” Marcus said.
“To give himself a reason to have been somewhere, or to have missed something, or to redirect attention.”
He paused.
“I didn’t know which one until I ran the comparison.”
He took the tablet back and pulled up both videos side by side.
The grainy corridor footage on the left.
Devon on the right.
He tapped a function on the screen and a small overlay appeared, isolating the shadow cast by the figure in the first video.
The angle of the shoulders.
The proportion of the height against the door frame.
The way the left arm sat slightly lower than the right.
Then he overlaid it against Devon’s silhouette from the second footage.
The match prompt appeared at the bottom of the screen.
97.3%.
Aria stared at it.
“That’s not conclusive,” Kane said.
But his voice had changed.
“No,” Marcus agreed.
“It’s not. So I went further.”
He set the tablet down and reached into his jacket.
He placed a single folded document on the table.
“I needed something from Emma to run the test. It took me two weeks to do it without raising any suspicion.”
He paused.
“I compared her DNA to Devon’s.”
No one spoke.
“It’s not a match,” Marcus said.
“They are not related.”
The silence that followed was a different kind than the ones before it.
Kane didn’t move.
Aria looked at the document, then at Marcus, then back at the document.
“Run it again,” Kane said.
“I ran it three times,” Marcus said.
“Different samples, different lab. Same result every time.”
He waited one beat.
“I also ran Emma’s profile against Amanda’s.”
Aria’s breath stopped.
Marcus looked at her directly.
“She’s Amanda’s daughter.”