I was washing the car when my ten-year-old son screamed from somewhere inside the house.

They took Richard away in handcuffs, his expensive suit wrinkling against the plastic seat of the cruiser. Vance took the briefcase into evidence, leaving a uniform outside my house for the night. But the presence of a patrol car didn’t make the house feel safe. It felt like a tomb.

I put Leo to bed, sitting in the rocking chair in the corner of his room until his exhausted breathing evened out. His face was pale, tear tracks still drying on his cheeks. What kind of grandfather attacks a ten-year-old boy?

Once I was sure he was asleep, I walked down the hall to the room I hadn’t opened in twelve months: Elena’s home office.

The air inside was stale, smelling faintly of her lavender perfume and old paper. If someone had forged her signature in the last forty-eight hours, they needed a reference. A flawless one. I tore through her desk drawers, pulling out old tax returns, mortgage documents, birthday cards.

Everything was where it was supposed to be. But as I crouched to check the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet, I noticed something wrong. The thick layer of dust on the mahogany floor beneath the desk was disturbed.

Someone had been sitting in her chair recently.

My heart hammered against my ribs. I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight, sweeping it under the desk. Taped to the underside of the central drawer was a small, black plastic rectangle. A USB drive.

I ripped it free and plugged it into my laptop. The drive contained only one folder, heavily encrypted. But I knew Elena. I knew her patterns. After three attempts, I typed in the name of the obscure Italian restaurant where we had our first date, followed by Leo’s birth year. Trattoria2015.

The folder unlocked.

Inside were hundreds of PDF documents, bank statements from offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, and architectural blueprints for a massive, heavily fortified compound outside Montreal. But the most chilling file was a simple audio recording, dated three days ago.

I clicked play.

“Richard, it’s me. The accounts are drained. Mark suspects nothing. I need Leo. Execute the extraction on Tuesday. If Mark gets in the way, kill him.”