Chapter 2 - The Debt That Was Never Hers
A voice came through the speaker.
“Damian.”
Hazel stopped breathing.
She knew that voice.
“Wyatt?”
Silence.
Then:
“Hazel?”
Her knees weakened.
Damian caught her elbow.
She didn't pull away.
“Where are you?” she demanded.
Wyatt laughed softly.
Not the laugh she remembered.
This one sounded tired.
“Still asking the wrong questions.”
“You're alive.”
“Unfortunately.”
Hazel’s shock hardened into anger.
“You left me with sixty thousand dollars of debt.”
“I left you alive.”
“You forged my signature.”
“No.”
Damian looked at Marco.
Marco immediately began tracing the call.
Hazel stared at the phone.
“Then who did?”
“Someone who needed Sullivan to believe you belonged to the debt.”
“Why?”
The line crackled.
“Because you were never collateral, Hazel.”
Damian leaned closer.
“What was she?”
Wyatt went silent.
Damian repeated the question.
“What was Hazel supposed to be?”
“A key.”
Hazel looked at Damian.
“To what?”
Wyatt inhaled.
Then gunfire exploded through the phone.
Hazel screamed his name.
The call disconnected.
Marco checked his device.
“Trace failed.”
Hazel stared at the silent phone.
Damian picked up the photograph.
A key.
Not collateral.
Why?
He looked at the scratched bracelet on Hazel’s wrist.
“Where did you get that?”
Hazel touched it.
“My mother.”
“When?”
“Before she died.”
Damian’s expression tightened.
“Her name?”
“Sarah Brooks.”
Marco looked sharply at him.
Damian saw it.
“You know that name too?”
Neither answered.
Hazel stood.
“I am getting extremely tired of everyone in this room knowing things about my life except me.”
Damian walked to the safe.
He removed an old ledger.
Hazel recognized nothing about it.
Damian opened to a page dated twenty-five years earlier.
One entry had been circled.
S. BROOKS.
Beside it:
W.S.B.
The letters on Hazel’s bracelet.
“What is that?”
Damian answered carefully.
“West Side Benevolent Trust.”
“That sounds harmless.”
“It wasn't.”
The trust had been used by several Chicago families to hide money.
Romano money.
Sullivan money.
And millions belonging to people who were now dead.
Sarah Brooks had worked as an accountant.
Then she vanished.
Years later, she resurfaced under her own name with a daughter.
Hazel.
“Why would my mother have this?”
“That's what we need to find out.”
Hazel stared at the bracelet.
Her mother had died when Hazel was sixteen.
Cancer.
Ordinary.
Cruel.
Nothing mysterious.
Or so Hazel had believed.
Damian ordered breakfast.
Hazel refused it.
He put a plate in front of her anyway.
“You can’t order me to eat.”
“I can in my house.”
“That isn't how food works.”
“It is today.”
Despite herself, she ate.
Hours passed.
Marco’s team examined the forged guarantee.
The signature was good.
Too good.
But the document itself contained a problem.
The date.
It had supposedly been signed at a bank branch on a Monday morning.
Hazel had been working across town.
Payroll records proved it.
More importantly, the notary stamp belonged to a man who had died two weeks earlier.
“The contract is fabricated,” Marco said.
Hazel almost laughed.
“I knew that.”
“Yes,” Damian said. “Now we can prove it.”
“To Sullivan?”
“No.”
“To whom?”
“Everyone.”
Hazel studied him.
“You’re planning something.”
“I usually am.”
She looked at his bandage.
“You also usually get shot?”
“Not usually.”
“You were shot?”
“Grazed.”
“That amount of blood was a graze?”
Damian almost smiled again.
Hazel noticed.
He noticed her noticing.
The moment became strangely intimate.
Then Marco returned.
“We located Wyatt’s call.”
“Where?”
“Near St. Vincent Hospital.”
Hazel stood.
“We’re going.”
“No,” Damian said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re staying here.”
“That man destroyed my life.”
“And someone just shot at him.”
“Exactly.”
Damian stepped closer.
“You’re not walking into an ambush.”
“You don’t own me.”
His face changed.
Not anger.
Something deeper.
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
Hazel had expected an argument.
Instead, Damian took a pistol from his desk.
“Then if you insist on going, you stay beside me.”
Thirty minutes later, Hazel sat inside an armored SUV.
Chicago moved outside the tinted windows.
Damian sat beside her.
His security detail surrounded them.
“You really haven't touched a woman in four years?”
The question escaped before Hazel could stop it.
Damian slowly turned.
She wanted to disappear.
“I’m sorry.”
“There it is.”
Hazel looked out the window.
“Forget I asked.”
“No.”
She glanced back.
“No, I haven't.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
Elena.
The dead fiancée.
Hazel nodded.
“I loved her.”
Damian said it without drama.
That made it heavier.
“She died because someone wanted to hurt me.”
Hazel looked at his hands.
“So you stopped letting anyone close.”
“Yes.”
“That sounds lonely.”
“It was efficient.”
Hazel almost smiled.
At the hospital, Wyatt wasn't registered.
But Marco found blood behind a loading dock.
They followed it to an abandoned clinic across the street.
Damian ordered Hazel to remain in the SUV.
This time she listened.
For seven minutes.
Then gunfire sounded.
Hazel opened the door.
The guard protested.
She ran anyway.
Inside, she found Damian standing over a wounded man.
Wyatt.
Hazel stopped.
He looked older.
Thinner.
But alive.
“Hazel.”
She slapped him.
Hard.
Nobody stopped her.
“That was for the sixty thousand.”
Wyatt touched his cheek.
“I didn't forge it.”
“That was for disappearing.”
She slapped him again.
Damian watched silently.
Wyatt almost smiled.
“I probably deserved both.”
“Probably?”
Then Wyatt saw the bracelet.
His face changed.
“Where did you get that?”
“My mother.”
“You still have it.”
“What is it?”
Wyatt looked toward Damian.
“Tell her.”
“I don't know enough.”
Wyatt laughed bitterly.
“Romano never told you?”
“Told me what?”
Wyatt struggled upright.
“Sarah Brooks didn't work for the trust.”
Hazel stared at him.
“She created the account system.”
Damian went still.
Wyatt continued.
“And before she disappeared, she copied everything.”
“Everything what?”
“Names. Judges. cops. businesses. murders. payoffs.”
Hazel’s stomach turned.
“Where?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Then why are they after me?”
“Because Sarah left instructions.”
“What instructions?”
Wyatt looked at her bracelet.
“The archive can only be opened by her daughter.”
A sound came from behind them.
A safety clicked off.
Damian spun.
The clinic door had opened.
May you like
A man stood there with a gun.
And he was wearing Damian Romano’s security badge.
