Chapter 5 - The Snake in the Family
The third-floor study smelled of aged leather, cigar smoke, and expensive bourbon.
Rory sat behind a massive mahogany desk carved from a single piece of reclaimed timber from an 18th-century naval dockyard. A single brass desk lamp illuminated a series of encrypted financial manifests spread out before him. His phone rested beside his right hand, silent and dark.
A sharp, firm knock rapped against the heavy study door.
Rory didn't look up. “It's locked. Leave the files on the console downstairs.”
The knock came again—sharper this time, urgent, refusing to be dismissed.
Rory’s head snapped up, his dark eyes flashing with irritation. He stood up, crossing the room in three long strides, and wrenched the door open, prepared to chew out whichever security guard had lost their mind.
Standing in the doorway was Lena.
She wasn't wearing her housekeeping apron anymore. Her face was pale, her slate-gray eyes burning with a fierce, unwavering intensity, and in her outstretched hand, resting on a clean white linen cloth, lay the mutilated electronics assembly and the golden-brown teddy bear.
“Mr. Starks,” Lena said, her voice steady and clear, cutting through the heavy silence of the hallway. “You need to look at this right now.”
Rory stared at her, dumbfounded. For a fraction of a second, his mind struggled to bridge the gap between his domestic staff and the dangerous perimeter of his life.
“Lena? What is this? It's three in the morning—”
“It's three o'clock,” Lena interrupted, stepping past him into the study without waiting for permission. She placed the items down on the mahogany desk directly beneath the brass lamp. “And if you walk down to the nursery right now, your daughters are about to start screaming in exactly sixty seconds.”
Rory’s breath caught in his throat. He looked down at the metal-and-plastic contraption resting beside the stuffed bear.
“Explain.”
“That bear was a gift from your sister, Susan,” Lena said, her voice dropping into a hard, clinical efficiency that belonged in a courtroom rather than a laundry room. “I felt a hard edge in the spine three days ago. Tonight, before the girls woke up, I opened it. That device is an ultrasonic acoustic pulser. It’s programmed to emit a high-frequency sound wave at precisely three o'clock every morning—a frequency adults can't hear, but children's ears pick up like a drill hitting nerve tissue. It induces auditory hallucinations, artificial panic, and severe neurological distress.”
The room spun.
The air rushed out of Rory’s lungs as if he had taken a sledgehammer directly to the solar plexus. The tattooed hands gripping the edge of the mahogany desk turned white, the wood groaning under the pressure.
Fifty-six nights.
Fifty-six nights of holding his daughters while they clawed at their ears, begging someone to cut the buzzing out of their heads. Fifty-six nights of watching doctors throw theories at him while he tore the house apart looking for ghosts.
And all the while, the weapon had been sitting between them on the mattress, wrapped in golden fur and a pretty blue ribbon.
From down the hallway, faint and muffled through two sets of thick oak doors, the first thin, terrified wail of a child pierced the silence.
“Daddy! It’s inside my head! Make it stop!”
Lily’s voice.
Rory didn't run to the nursery. He didn't pick up the phone. His body went dead still, every drop of blood in his veins turning to liquid nitrogen.
“Susan,” Rory whispered. The name came out like the slide of a knife from a sheath.
“Your sister’s husband, Arthur, runs an industrial acoustic engineering firm in Boston,” Lena added quietly, watching him with steady eyes. “They were facing bankruptcy six months ago. The only thing keeping their creditors at bay was the trust fund your father set up for Lily and Rose—a fund managed jointly by you and Susan, with a clause stating that if both children were declared psychologically unfit or removed from your custody due to unstable environment, guardianship defaults to the surviving nearest blood relative.”
Susan.
Susan wanted the girls out of the way, or broken enough to strip him of his custody rights, allowing her and her failing husband to raid the multi-million-dollar trust and salvage their crumbling social standing.
Susan, who had kissed his daughters on the cheek and smiled into their eyes while twisting a knife in their brains.
Rory slowly straightened up. The billionaire mafia boss, the feared waterfront kingpin who played chess with syndicates and politicians, vanished in an instant. In his place stood an apex predator whose cubs had been hunted in their own den.
He reached out and picked up the device, sliding it into his trouser pocket. Then he picked up his encrypted satellite phone, dialed a single speed-dial number, and pressed it to his ear.
“Boss?” Tommy Bellucci’s gruff voice answered on the first ring.
“Get the Gulfstream prepped at MacArthur Airport,” Rory said, his voice terrifyingly calm, devoid of any human warmth whatsoever. “Call the team in Manhattan. I want Susan Starks and her husband Arthur pulled out of their bed in Tribeca right now. Bring them to the old warehouse on the East River. Don't hurt them.”
May you like
He paused, a dark, lethal edge cutting through the static.
“Not yet. Just make sure they have a front-row seat when I explain what happens to people who hurt my family.”
