Chapter 3 - The Mechanic's Secret
Within an hour, my entire reality was rewritten.
Ethan’s private security detail escorted us to his penthouse—a sprawling, high-security fortress suspended high above the Chicago skyline. I wasn't an employee anymore; I was family. Ethan hired a private pediatrician to check on Lily and filled the guest wing with everything a baby could possibly need.
For the next three days, Ethan barely slept. He turned his home office into a war room, tearing through police reports and financial ledgers, desperately trying to find the man who had ordered the hit on his brother.
On the fourth night, I was putting Lily to sleep in her crib when a memory suddenly struck me like a bolt of lightning.
I rushed into Ethan's office. He was standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows, staring out at the city lights, holding a glass of scotch. He looked exhausted, the burden of the Callahan empire weighing heavily on his shoulders.
"Ethan," I said, my voice urgent.
He turned immediately, his eyes scanning me for any sign of distress. "Is she okay? Do you need something?"
"The day before Caleb died," I said, my pulse racing as the pieces finally clicked together. "He came home from the auto shop looking terrified. He said a sleek black car had been brought in for a detailing, and he found something underneath the passenger seat. He hid it in a rusted toolbox in his garage and told me that if anything ever happened to him, I needed to keep it safe."
Ethan went entirely still. "Do you still have the toolbox?"
"It's in the trunk of my car," I breathed.
Ten minutes later, we were standing in the secure, underground garage of the penthouse. Ethan used a crowbar to pry open the rusted lock of Caleb's old toolbox. Beneath a pile of heavy wrenches and grease-stained rags, there was a small, waterproof envelope.
Ethan opened it. Inside was a black USB drive and a blood-stained ledger.
As we plugged it into his laptop, the terrifying truth of Caleb's death materialized on the screen. It wasn't a rival syndicate that had ordered the hit. It was Marcus Vance, the Chief Operating Officer of Callahan Global Holdings—Ethan’s most trusted advisor. Vance had been embezzling billions from the company, laundering it through offshore accounts. Caleb, working as a lowly mechanic, had found the hard copy of the ledger hidden in Vance's car.
Vance killed Caleb to silence him. And right now, Vance was sitting in the boardroom, preparing to vote Ethan out of his own company.
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"He killed my brother," Ethan whispered, a dark, lethal fury radiating from his body.
"Then we destroy him," I said, my voice completely steady. I wasn't just a frightened, broke single mother anymore. I was a woman defending the father of her child. I looked Ethan straight in the eye. "Tell me what we need to do."
