Grant pressed the button.
First there was static. Then a man’s voice, unmistakable.
“With those photographs and the altered emails, it’ll be enough. Grant is proud. If he thinks his wife cheated on him, he’ll never check the accounts.”
It was Russell Kane.
His business partner and best friend of twenty years.
The next voice was Courtney’s.
“And if Natalie proves it’s all fake?”
“She won’t get the chance. By then she’ll be out of the hotel.”
Grant switched off the recorder, shaking.
Then they heard footsteps.
Russell appeared in the doorway.
“Grant! Courtney called me, worried sick. She says your ex-wife is trying to manipulate you.”
Grant slipped the recorder inside his jacket.
“I found some strange papers. Somebody must be messing with me.”
“Give them to me. I’ll look into it.”
“Frank already has them,” Grant lied.
For a few seconds Russell studied him.
Then he smiled.
“Of course, brother. That’s what friends are for.”
When Russell left, Natalie gripped Grant’s arm.
“That man knows a lot more than what we just heard.”
Grant was about to answer when another call came in.
It was Jenna.
She was crying.
“Mr. Holloway… I’m so sorry. I went to get juice, and when I came back the boys were gone. A man said you’d sent him. He showed me an executive ID…”
Natalie snatched the phone.
“Where are my sons?”
No one answered.
Grant ran to the security room.
The cameras showed Russell walking down a service corridor. He was carrying Eli and holding Owen by the hand.
The boys didn’t seem to understand what was happening.
Then the internal phone rang.
Grant recognized his friend’s voice.
“Don’t do anything stupid. Your boys are with me, and nothing’s happened to them yet.”
“Russell, if you hurt them…”
“Shut up and listen. Your ex-wife took a flash drive with the original records for the North Tower project. I’ve been looking for it for five years.”
Natalie began to shake.
“What does that have to do with my children?”
Russell laughed.
“You know exactly where you hid it, Natalie. You always were good with a needle and thread.”
Grant looked at the teddy bear Eli had left behind in the children’s lounge.
Natalie put a hand over her mouth.
Beneath the black stitching on the toy’s belly lay the secret she had guarded for five years.
And now Russell was ready to use her own children to get it.
PART 3
“You have twenty minutes,” Russell said over the phone. “After that, I won’t answer for what happens.”
Grant gripped the receiver so hard his knuckles turned white.
“What exactly do you want?”
“The original drive. No fake copies, and no police. Natalie brings it to the old ballroom in the east wing. Alone.”
“Russell, they’re five-year-old boys.”
“And you’re a man with a lot to lose. Don’t complicate things.”
The call ended.
Natalie stood frozen, hugging Eli’s teddy bear.
“Give it to me,” Grant said.
“No.”
“Natalie, we need to know what’s on it.”
She looked at him, eyes full of tears.
“Five years ago you took everything from me because you trusted a folder full of lies. This drive was the only thing that could prove I was telling the truth.”
With a pair of small scissors she’d asked for at the front desk, she carefully opened a seam on the toy.
She pulled out a flash drive wrapped in plastic.
“I found out someone was siphoning money from the construction of the hotel. There were fake invoices, nonexistent vendors, and transfers that ended up in accounts controlled by Russell. When I started investigating, those photographs of my supposed lover appeared.”
Grant shivered.
“The man at the restaurant?”
“He was an accountant helping me review the transactions. Russell turned him into my lover and forged messages so you’d believe it.”
Natalie took a deep breath.
“There was more than two million dollars involved, Grant. I’d saved copies of the original books before they altered the records. First I hid the drive among my belongings. Then, when the boys were born, I sewed it inside the bear I made for Eli.”
“Why didn’t you ever report it?”
“I did. But without access to the original servers, the investigation went nowhere. My lawyer advised me to hold on to the evidence. Then people started following me. I moved twice. My priority stopped being getting the hotel back. It was protecting our sons.”
That last sentence shattered him.
While Grant had been celebrating deals and traveling with Courtney, Natalie had raised two little boys alone, working as a freelance designer and living in fear that someone would find that evidence.
But there was no time for regret now.
Grant called Diane Park, the attorney who had stood by Natalie all those years. He asked her to hand the digital copies over to the Travis County District Attorney’s office immediately and to report the boys’ abduction.
Diane confirmed she still had backups of the records and said she would request police intervention.
Then Grant went back to the cameras.
Russell had taken the boys toward the old wing, a section closed for renovations.
Frank, the head of security, had vanished from his post.
“He’s involved too,” Grant murmured.
That was when he understood that for years he had handed the keys to his company to the very people who were destroying it.
Courtney was sitting in the conference room when Grant returned.
When she saw him, she dropped her purse.
“Russell took the boys,” he said. “And you’re going to tell me everything.”
Courtney started to cry.
Six years earlier, her mother had needed an expensive operation. Russell had paid over twenty-five thousand dollars to help her.
Then he asked for a small favor: to let him look at the emails and documents that came into Grant’s office.
