Chapter 12 - The Dead Uncle
His name was Victor Hart.
Cassidy had been twelve the last time she saw him.
Victor was Evelyn Hart’s only son.
Brilliant.
Charming.
Dangerous with money.
Evelyn removed him from Meridian after discovering he had secretly leveraged company assets to cover speculative losses.
Months later, Victor disappeared.
Two years after that, the family received word that he had died in a boating accident near Croatia.
No body was recovered.
Evelyn never spoke about him again.
Cassidy had assumed grief was the reason.
Now she wondered whether her grandmother had suspected Victor was alive.
Margaret looked stunned.
“You’re certain?”
“Scar above the left eyebrow.”
Margaret sat down.
“He got that in a warehouse accident.”
Owen whispered.
“My father hated Victor.”
Cassidy looked at Thomas Price’s archive again.
R. Vale.
Richard Vale.
Maybe the letter R had never meant Richard.
Maybe it meant something else.
“Did Victor ever use an alias?”
Margaret nodded slowly.
“When Evelyn pushed him out, he sometimes traveled as Victor Rayne.”
Cassidy stared at the screen.
R. Vale.
Rayne Vale?
Or a deliberate combination of names.
Someone had spent years obscuring identity inside records.
Cassidy called Sloane again.
“Did Brendan ever call the older man anything?”
Sloane thought.
“Once.”
“What?”
“Mr. Rayne.”
The room went silent.
Victor Hart was alive.
And he had been meeting with Brendan.
The conspiracy suddenly had a motive larger than greed.
Victor had been born expecting to inherit Meridian.
Evelyn had taken it away.
Cassidy had received what he believed should have been his.
If Cassidy became incapacitated and Brendan controlled the unborn heir, Victor could influence Brendan from behind the scenes.
Brendan thought he was stealing a company.
Victor was reclaiming one.
Cassidy called Daniel.
“Find Victor Hart.”
Daniel nodded.
“We need a recent image.”
“Sloane has one.”
They scanned the photograph from the safe apartment.
Within an hour, private facial-recognition databases produced possible matches.
Victor Hart had lived under multiple identities.
London.
Toronto.
Zurich.
Miami.
For the last eighteen months, one identity had appeared repeatedly in Chicago.
Victor Rayne.
Consultant.
No listed employer.
Marcus traced his financial history.
Then he found something stranger.
Victor was not receiving money from Brendan.
He was paying him.
The first payment occurred four years earlier.
Six months before Brendan proposed to Cassidy.
Cassidy stared at the date.
Her marriage had not merely been exploited after it began.
There was a possibility it had been engineered before it began.
She remembered meeting Brendan at a charity auction.
He had seemed surprised to discover who her grandmother was.
He said he had no idea Cassidy came from money.
She had believed him.
Now Marcus placed a transaction in front of her.
Three weeks before that charity auction, Victor transferred $75,000 to Brendan through a Cayman consulting company.
Payment description.
RELATIONSHIP DEVELOPMENT.
Cassidy sat completely still.
Her baby moved.
She covered her stomach with both hands.
May you like
Brendan had not simply betrayed their marriage.
He may never have entered it honestly at all.
