Chapter 3: The Neon and the Ledger
The back of Roman’s town car smelled of aged leather, rain, and expensive cedarwood—a sensory world so distant from our damp basement apartment that it felt like an airlock on a spaceship. Sophie had fallen asleep almost the moment the heavy door thudded shut, her head pillowed heavily on my lap, her small chest rising and falling in deep, exhausted rhythms.
I stared out the rain-streaked window as the neon lights of downtown blurred into long, bleeding streaks of red and yellow. Roman sat across from us on the jump seat, his laptop open on his knees, the screen casting a pale blue glow across his tired, imposing face. He hadn't said a word since we left the hotel. He didn't have to. The frantic clicking of his keyboard was the only sound in the cavernous interior, save for the rhythmic swish of the windshield wipers.
When the car finally slid into the underground parking garage of his corporate tower—a monolithic glass-and-steel needle piercing the dark sky—the silence felt heavier than before.
Roman stepped out first, holding the heavy rear door open for us himself, ignoring the protocol of the driver who hurried around with an umbrella. He didn't offer to carry Sophie—he knew better than to wake her—but he walked beside us with a protective, deliberate stride that kept the cavernous concrete garage feeling small.
Upstairs, his private office on the forty-second floor was a desert of minimalism: dark mahogany desk, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the rain-slicked river, and a single brass lamp throwing a pool of amber light over a stack of leather-bound files.
Roman motioned for me to sit on the white leather sofa by the window while he laid Sophie gently across the cushions, draping his own cashmere suit jacket over her small frame like a blanket. She stirred once, murmuring something about bread and butter, then drifted back down into the heavy sleep of the deeply exhausted.
Roman walked over to his desk, picked up a heavy silver tablet, and slid it across the glass coffee table toward me.
"Look at it," he said, his voice flat, drained of the corporate polish he wore downstairs. "Every wire transfer is timestamped. Every routing number matches the trust account established when Sophie was born. Fifty thousand dollars, on the first of every month, without a single exception, for thirty-six consecutive months."
I leaned forward, the blue light of the screen catching my eyes. I scrolled down, past the columns of clean, orderly numbers that represented sums of money I couldn't even conceptualize—amounts that could have bought our building, our street, our entire neighborhood twice over.
"And here," Roman continued, tapping the screen with a finger that didn't quite steady itself, "is the destination account. The primary beneficiary holding the master key."
"Helena," I whispered.
"Helena," he confirmed, the name dropping like a lead weight. "She claimed you and Sophie chose to disappear, that you refused contact, that the funds were being held in an escrow account for your future education once you reached eighteen. She had my signature forged on the secondary release forms six months after I left for the European expansion."
I looked up from the screen, my eyes burning not with tears, but with a cold, clear rage that had been building since the day the heat was shut off.
"You left us with her," I said, the words slipping out before I could bite them back. "You knew what she was. You knew how she treated anyone who didn't fit into her gilded cage. You thought a monthly check was enough to buy your conscience clear."
Roman didn't flinch. He didn't look away, and he didn't offer a cowardly excuse. He took off his gold-rimmed glasses, folded them deliberately, and laid them on the glass table.
"I was an arrogant fool who believed that power and money could protect people from malice," Roman said quietly, his voice rough. "I was wrong. And tonight, that error ends."
May you like
He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a heavy brass key with an old-fashioned Yale head, and laid it beside the tablet.
"That unlocks the secure archive downstairs," Roman said, looking directly into my eyes. "Every document, every offshore routing slip, every signature Helena used to rob my daughter. I want you to take it. All of it. Because tomorrow morning, we aren't going to her lawyers. We’re going to the federal prosecutor's office."
