Chapter 10 - THE MAN I THOUGHT WAS DEAD
I barely slept.
Every childhood memory of my father returned.
His habit of checking the locks twice.
The way he always sat facing restaurant entrances.
The night he vanished, he had hugged me longer than usual.
I had thought he was distracted.
Now I understood.
He had known someone was coming.
At sunrise, Luka found me sitting beside Emma’s crib.
“You should sleep.”
“So should you.”
“I’m bad at it.”
I almost smiled.
Then I asked the question I had been afraid to ask since the hospital.
“Is my father dead?”
Luka looked toward the window.
“You deserve the whole truth.”
My heartbeat quickened.
“He survived the night he disappeared.”
I stood.
“What?”
“Richard Mercer’s men intercepted him outside Baltimore.”
“Sofia had already introduced him to people who could get him out.”
“My father’s enemies?”
“My family.”
I stared at him.
“You helped hide him.”
“I helped move him.”
“Where?”
“I wasn’t told.”
Anger exploded through me.
“You let me believe he was dead for nine years.”
“Your father ordered it.”
“I was sixteen.”
“He believed staying away was the only way to keep you alive.”
“That should have been my choice.”
“Yes.”
Luka’s answer stopped me.
He didn’t defend my father.
He didn’t defend himself.
“He made the wrong choice for the right reason.”
Luka said.
“And I helped him.”
“If you hate me for that, you have every right.”
I wanted to.
But Emma began crying.
And hatred suddenly felt like a luxury I didn’t have.
Later that afternoon, Mara received an encrypted email.
There was no sender.
Only an audio attachment.
She played it.
My father’s voice filled the room.
Older.
Weaker.
But unmistakable.
“Claire.”
I stopped breathing.
“If Luka has reached you, then the protection plan failed.”
“I’m sorry.”
Tears ran down my face.
“I wanted to come home every day.”
“But Richard Mercer had people inside law enforcement, the courts, and the hospital system.”
“I could not risk bringing them to you.”
Then he said something unexpected.
“M-17 is not the most dangerous evidence.”
Luka looked at Mara.
My father continued.
“The DNA proves what Richard Mercer did twenty-eight years ago.”
“But File M-18 proves what Ethan did nine years ago.”
My stomach dropped.
There had never been any mention of M-18.
The recording ended with an address.
Luka recognized it.
An abandoned federal safe apartment in Virginia.
Mara immediately called a contact.
Twenty minutes later, she returned with a pale face.
“The apartment is occupied.”
“By who?”
She looked directly at me.
“A man using the name Thomas Bennett.”
My father was alive.
May you like
And for the first time in nine years, I knew where he was.
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