Chapter 7 - The Ghost From The Past
I ripped off my suit jacket and pressed it hard against my mother's bleeding stomach.
Eleanor coughed violently, her face growing paler by the second in the freezing rain.
I demanded to know what she needed forgiveness for.
She looked at Maria with tears streaming down her perfectly wrinkled face.
Eleanor confessed that she had known about the offshore syndicate all along.
She admitted that she was the one who had originally hired Maria's husband to audit Victoria's family.
When the audit revealed the truth, Victoria's father had demanded the accountant be silenced.
Eleanor wept, revealing that she had looked the other way to protect our own family's wealth.
Maria stood frozen, staring at the woman who had indirectly caused her husband's murder.
I expected Maria to scream or run away from us in absolute disgust.
Instead, Maria knelt in the mud and placed her hands over mine, helping apply pressure to the wound.
She looked into my mother's eyes and told her that surviving the night was the only thing that mattered right now.
I hoisted my mother into the helicopter, and Maria quickly buckled Lily into a seat.
I jumped into the pilot's seat, thankful for the aviation lessons my father had forced upon me.
I flew us low beneath the radar, heading toward a secret medical facility run by a loyal friend.
The doctors rushed Eleanor into an underground trauma bay as soon as we landed.
I sat in the sterile waiting room, completely exhausted and covered in my mother's blood.
Maria sat beside me, resting her head on my shoulder in a gesture of pure, unconditional support.
A doctor finally emerged and told us that Eleanor had survived the emergency surgery.
He handed me a small, encrypted titanium flash drive that he had found hidden inside Eleanor's bra.
I realized this was the master ledger my mother had risked her life to retrieve from the vault.
This drive contained enough evidence to send Victoria and her entire bloodline to federal prison forever.
I told Maria I had to go to a secure terminal immediately to upload the files to the FBI.
As I stood up to leave, little Lily tugged gently on my bloodstained sleeve.
She handed me a crumpled drawing she had made on a medical napkin.
It was a drawing of a scary man she claimed she had seen hiding in the hospital hallway.
I looked at the drawing and felt the blood freeze completely solid in my veins.
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The drawing perfectly depicted a man with a jagged scar across his left eye.
That was the exact, unmistakable scar that belonged to Maria's supposedly dead husband.
