Chapter 60 THE VOICE ON THE SCREEN

Chapter 60 THE VOICE ON THE SCREEN
Dalton

The grey coat filled the screen, and my heart slammed against my chest. I knew that iron latch. I knew the exact layout of the stairs and the pink blanket Tehila had left to air. That was my grandmother’s safe house. 

“Fred! Get Fred on the line now!” 

The words rushed out of my throat, before I realized that I was already moving. A chair crashed behind me, and my fist tightly wrapped around my phone. 

“They are still there.” Cole slammed his fist onto the table, leaning so close to the screen his breath fogged the glass. "The two officers are still posted at the perimeter, right down by the driveway! They're right there!"

But the man on the screen did not stop. He climbed the steps, lifted his hand, and gently set something small on the doormat.

"Call her house," I said. "Call it now."

Lucas already had his phone pressed against his ear. The silence in the room stretched. Then, his shoulders dropped and he nodded, letting out a rough breath. "The officer says it's all clear. No one approached the door. The street is completely empty." He looked up. "Dalton, look at the timestamp on the feed."

I forced my eyes down to the bottom corner of the laptop screen. The corner of the video read a date three weeks old. My stomach turned over. The man in the grey coat was not there tonight. He was showing me that he had stood on my grandmother's step weeks ago, while we were busy thinking we were safe. 

Tehila's hand found my arm. "It is a recording," she breathed. "He is telling us he was always ahead of us."

The screen went black. And then, without a ring, it filled again with a face.

I had seen that face only in a photograph an hour ago, a dead man who had buried my father. Now it was living. He was older, of course. The long, careful jawline had softened and loosened with the years, and his hair had turned white and thin, clinging loosely to his scalp. But his eyes had not changed at all. They were Sienna’s eyes, or maybe she had just spent her entire childhood learning how to copy them from him.

"Hello, Dalton." Gerald Thorne's voice was soft, the same voice that had read my father's will aloud in a wood-panelled room while I sat too young to understand any of it. "You have figured it out. I confess I am impressed. It took you longer than I hoped, but you got there. Blackwoods always get there. Just never in time."

Across the desk, Lucas’s laptop screen cast a blue glow over his face. His fingers flew across the keyboard in total silence, desperate to intercept the transmission

"You are dead," I said. The words came out sounding much steadier than the chaos happening in my pulse. "You’ve been dead for over twenty years."

"I have been free for all that years." Thorne folded his hands. Behind him was a plain wall, and a lamp. There was nothing to tell us where to find the room

"A dead man owns nothing and owes nothing. A dead man can sit at a family's table and watch it rot from the inside and no one thinks to ask his name. I held your hand at Richard's grave, Dalton. Do you remember? You cried. I told you your father was a good man." His mouth twitched. "It was the only lie I ever told you."

"My father…"

"Your father was a thief." The softness did not change, and that was the horror of it. "He destroyed the Montgomerys and called it business. He took everything from people I loved and slept soundly. There was a girl in that family. A bright child who was passed from hand to hand until there were no hands left but mine." Something flickered far back in his eyes, like rage. "I raised her, Dalton. I raised her carefully. I gave her purpose when the world had given her nothing."

"You made her a murderer," Tehila said. She had stepped into the frame beside me, chin up, and I loved her so much in that moment it hurt. "You took a broken child and you sharpened her into a knife and you threw her at strangers. That is not love. That is the cruelest thing a person can do to another person."

Thorne looked at her for a long moment. "You are braver than he deserves," he said quietly. "That's a pity."

Then he leaned toward the camera, and his voice dropped to something almost tender, and every hair on my body rose.

"I am a fair man, Dalton, whatever you think of me. So I will give you what your father never gave anyone. A choice." He let the word sit. "Transfer two hundred million into the account I am sending you now. Stand before the cameras your family loves so much, and tell the world what Richard Blackwood truly was. Do that, and I will vanish. You keep your children, your grandmother, whatever is left of your name. I am old. I will take my justice in words and money and die somewhere warm."

My phone buzzed against my palm. An account number had arrived.

"I won't do that.”

"Then I do to you what your father did to us." He smiled. "I take it piece by piece. Your companies. Your name in every paper. Every friend, every partner, every door that ever opened for you, I will close. I will make you as poor and as hated and as alone as that girl was the night she came to me. And when you have nothing left, when you finally understand exactly how it felt…" he paused, "only then will I come for the rest."

The screen went dark.

For a moment no one breathed. The bottle warmer in the corner hummed on. Lucas stopped typing and stared at his screen, and I saw the answer on his face before he said it.

"He is gone." His voice cracked. "And he left no trace. I have never seen anything like it. He wanted us to try." He pushed back from the table. "There is no thread to pull, Dalton. He is invisible."

I looked at the account number  on my phone. Two hundred million to bury my father's memory and buy my family’s lives. 

Tehila took my face in both her hands and made me look at her, and her eyes were wet and fierce and did not let me go.

"Dalton," she whispered. "What do we do? Do we pay a monster to save our lives? Or do we refuse, and lose everything, and pray?"

I opened my mouth to answer.

And my phone rang again. It was from the  safe house. The one number that was only ever supposed to bring good news.

The nurse's voice was shaking so hard I could barely understand her.

"Mr. Blackwood. Someone was just here. They left a box. For the twins."