Chapter 4 - The Girl in Apartment 4C
Selene did not go to Mercy Street at ten.
Neither did Ivy.
The police did.
So did a federal task force once the microcassette, trafficking allegations, financial grants, and threatened exchange turned a violent husband into something larger than a domestic case.
Damen stayed away from the operation.
Selene insisted.
He hated it.
That helped.
At 9:58 p.m., two unmarked vehicles watched the clinic block.
At 10:06, a man in a gray hood entered through the alley.
Not Preston.
He placed a package beside the side door and left.
Officers stopped him three blocks away.
Inside the package was Selene’s father’s notebook.
No cassette.
A note was taped to the cover.
ONE LIFE FOR ONE TAPE.
Selene read it at Damen’s dining table at midnight.
Ivy sat across from her, wrapped in a robe, bruising visible beneath one eye.
“He means me,” Ivy said.
“No.”
“He does.”
“He can mean whatever he wants. You are not currency.”
Ivy looked at Damen.
“Your people say things like that too?”
Damen’s expression remained still.
“My people used to.”
Selene looked at him sharply.
“Used to?”
He did not dodge.
“My father did business with men who measured people as leverage. Debts. Family. Fear.”
“And you?”
“I inherited some of them.”
“That was not my question.”
Damen looked at Ivy first.
Then Selene.
“I have used fear. I have threatened men. I have hurt men. I have never sold a woman, traded one, or treated a child as collateral.”
Selene folded her arms.
“That is not sainthood.”
“No.”
“Good.”
Ivy gave a tiny laugh.
“You two flirt like people filing lawsuits.”
Selene stared at her.
Damen looked almost amused.
“I have cracked ribs,” Ivy said. “Let me have one joke.”
Fair.
The returned notebook contained more than Ruth’s scans.
Her father had documented eleven visits to the North Ashland building.
Emergency heat orders.
Blocked access.
Falsified repair receipts.
A tenant list.
Apartment 4C: Elena Volkov, sons Damen and Alexei, daughter Sofia.
Selene stopped on the name.
“Sofia.”
Damen nodded.
“She was six.”
Her father’s note beside the family read:
MOTHER REQUESTED SPACE HEATER. MANAGEMENT DEMANDED $300 ‘RESTORATION FEE’ BEFORE SERVICE.
Damen looked away.
“My mother never told me that.”
“She may not have wanted you to know.”
“She let me believe she was too proud to ask.”
“Maybe she was ashamed.”
“For what?”
“Being poor.”
The words came out harsher than Selene intended.
She softened.
“People get taught poverty is a personal failure. They hide needs that should never have been humiliating.”
Damen looked at the notebook.
Selene knew he was seeing his mother differently.
Not weak.
Not proud.
Trapped.
On the final pages, her father had written about a meeting with the city supervisor.
REPORT RETURNED — INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE OF OWNER NONCOMPLIANCE.
Then, below it:
PHOTOS MISSING FROM FILE.
One last line:
SOKOLOV CALLED HOME. SELENE ANSWERED. NEVER AGAIN USE HOME NUMBER.
Selene froze.
She was seven then.
A memory moved beneath years of forgetting.
A telephone ringing during dinner.
Her father taking the receiver from her hand too quickly.
His face changing.
She had never known why.
Damen watched her.
“You remember?”
“Maybe.”
She touched the page.
“My father died three months later.”
His eyes sharpened.
“No.”
Selene looked at him.
“No what?”
“We are not doing this.”
She almost laughed.
“Doing what?”
“Turning his heart attack into a murder because we hate the man who called him.”
Selene stared.
He had listened to her.
Evidence first.
She nodded.
“Good.”
“There’s that word.”
Ivy smiled despite herself.
The next morning, city archives found part of David Mercer’s inspection file.
Most pages survived.
The photographs did not.
But there was a supervisor routing slip.
The emergency order had been withdrawn by a deputy commissioner named Franklin Weller.
Weller died eleven years ago.
His estate records showed consulting income from Sokolov Property Group shortly after retirement.
Corruption, maybe.
Still not proof of why Sofia died.
Enough to reopen the housing case historically.
Enough to make Damen silent for an hour.
Selene left him alone.
She went to check Ivy.
Ivy was standing by the window with a laptop open.
“What are you doing?”
“Something I should have done months ago.”
Selene looked at the screen.
A password prompt.
Ivy typed six digits.
A spreadsheet opened.
Rows of names.
Payments.
Hotels.
Clinics.
Shell companies.
Selene’s blood went cold.
“What is this?”
“Preston’s private ledger.”
“You had it?”
“A copy.”
“For how long?”
“Three weeks.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
Ivy turned toward her.
“Because I stole it the night he burned my shoulder.”
Selene looked at the screen again.
North Lake Community Health Fund appeared seventeen times.
Mercy Street Clinic appeared twice.
The first entry was the fifty-thousand-dollar grant.
The second was dated the previous week.
PAYMENT PENDING — DR. MERCER COOPERATION / $250,000.
Selene stared.
“I never agreed to anything.”
“I know.”
“Then what does cooperation mean?”
Ivy scrolled right.
A notes column appeared.
Beside Selene’s name:
USE GRANT EXPOSURE. PRESSURE LICENSE. SHE WILL SIGN.
Selene felt the old familiar heat of anger become something cleaner.
Not fear.
Purpose.
“They weren’t waiting to see whether I helped them,” she said.
Ivy shook her head.
“No.”
“They had already planned how to force me.”
“Yes.”
Damen appeared in the doorway.
He saw the screen.
His face darkened.
Selene looked at him.
“No threats. No disappearing people. No river.”
He held her gaze.
“What do you want?”
Selene turned the laptop toward him.
“I want every name preserved, every payment traced, every victim given a choice, and every person who thinks a doctor can be bought to learn how expensive that mistake becomes.”
May you like
Damen’s mouth curved very slightly.
“That,” he said, “I can help with.”
