Chapter 12 - The Ghost from the Past
The discreet private investigator I hired went by the name of Silas, and he did not exist on any public record.
He arrived at my estate through a hidden service road, driving an unmarked vehicle with tinted windows.
Silas sat across from me in my home office, reviewing the photograph of Julian with cold, dead eyes.
I told him I needed to know exactly where Julian had been for the last six months and what he wanted from me now.
Silas did not take notes, simply absorbing the information with a terrifying level of professional calm.
Forty-eight hours later, Silas returned with a thick dossier containing the dark truth about Julian's disappearance.
Julian had not fled the country to escape the cartel; he had fled to make a deal with a rival syndicate.
When Brooke had funneled the eight hundred thousand dollars offshore, Julian had secretly stolen half of it for himself.
He had used that money to buy his way into a powerful European crime family, acting as their financial fixer.
But Julian had recently made a fatal miscalculation, losing millions of the syndicate's money in a failed laundering scheme.
Silas explained that the European bosses had given Julian exactly one month to repay the massive debt.
If he failed, they were going to execute him in a highly public, unimaginably brutal manner.
Julian did not want to be a father to the twins out of some sudden sense of parental guilt or twisted love.
He wanted the twins because he knew I would pay any price to keep them safe.
He was planning to hold his own biological children for a fifty-million-dollar ransom to save his own life.
The sheer depravity of his plan made my blood boil with a rage I had never experienced before.
I thanked Silas and handed him a blank check, telling him that our business was far from over.
I needed him to find a way to trap Julian before he could file a single legal document or make a move against my family.
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Silas warned me that backing a desperate criminal into a corner was the most dangerous game I could play.
I looked Silas dead in the eye and told him that Julian was about to find out exactly how dangerous I could be.
