Chapter 10 - THE PHOTOGRAPH
Luca got Paige and Elena through a crowded kitchen as alarms began to sound. Roman emerged from the lounge with a cut above his eyebrow, carrying a folder Mercer had tried to burn in a decorative fireplace. No one fired a shot. The immediate danger was simpler and more frightening: smoke was filling the corridor, and a locked emergency door had turned the hotel's service wing into a bottleneck. Paige helped a young dishwasher find the manual release while Luca called the fire department.
Outside, guests gathered beneath the hotel's bright awning. Mercer was gone. Donovan had vanished too. Roman sat on the ambulance step while a paramedic cleaned his wound, refusing to answer the reporters who had already arrived. Paige approached him with Elena and asked about the folder. He handed it over instead of hiding it.
Inside were copies of insurance documents, payment instructions, and a handwritten note bearing Mercer's initials. The papers did not prove who planted the bomb that killed Roman's family, but they showed Mercer had received a huge payment through a shell company the day after the explosion. Roman's accountant would need to verify the originals. Roman seemed almost relieved to have something concrete to examine rather than another memory to torture.
Paige went home to the borrowed apartment and found a letter pushed beneath the door. It contained a photograph of her late mother standing outside a warehouse beside a much younger Mercer. On the back someone had written: ASK ROMAN WHAT HIS FATHER DID TO HER.
Her mother had worked in payroll at the port before becoming ill. Paige remembered arguments about missing wages and a box of old records that had disappeared after the funeral. She called her aunt, who hesitated before admitting that Paige's mother had once reported irregularities at the port and lost her job soon afterward. Paige's stomach tightened. This was no longer a story she could leave to Roman and his accountant.
When Roman came to see her, she placed the photograph between them. He studied it and shook his head. “I've never seen this.”
“I don't know whether I believe you.”
“You shouldn't believe me just because I ask.”
Paige hated that he had learned to say exactly the right thing. She needed documents, not a convincing face. Together, but on opposite sides of the table, they began making a list of questions neither of them could afford to avoid.
The photograph of Paige's mother unsettled her more than the threat at the gala. She had spent years telling herself that her mother's dismissal was another ordinary injustice in a world full of them. Now the same names appeared in two generations of records. She feared that looking closer might change her memories of her mother, or reveal that the people who had made her life difficult had been nearby all along.
May you like
Roman did not reach for the photograph when she showed it to him. He waited until she slid it across the table. That restraint mattered more than his carefully chosen words. Paige had learned that trust was rarely born in dramatic declarations. It accumulated in small moments when someone with power chose not to use it.
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