Chapter 5 - The Brother's SecretDylan disappeared.
His apartment was empty.
His car was abandoned at the airport.
Police found no evidence he'd boarded a flight.
My father claimed he didn't know where Dylan was.
I didn't believe him.
Neither did Detective Ortiz.
Rachel placed me on administrative leave.
I spent the next three days going through old records.
Blackline wasn't just fraud.
It was a network.
People inside Halcyon had been manipulating contracts, inflating project costs, and redirecting millions through shell companies.
But there was something stranger.
Dylan had been trying to expose it.
I stared at the evidence.
My brother was incompetent.
Jealous.
Petty.
But was he part of the corruption?
Maybe not.
Maybe I'd misunderstood him.
Then I found a recording.
A voicemail from Dylan.
It had been sent to my phone nine hours before the attack.
I hadn't listened to it because it had been buried beneath hundreds of notifications.
His voice was shaky.
“Daniel, don't trust Dad.”
I froze.
“You're going to hate me for saying this.”
He swallowed.
“But I'm serious.”
A pause.
“Blackline isn't about money.”
The recording crackled.
“Dad is cleaning up something much bigger.”
I listened again.
There was a background noise.
A train horn.
Then Dylan said:
“If anything happens to me, check the old storage facility.”
The message ended.
I called Ortiz.
“Where?”
Dylan had rented a storage unit under his name.
We found it that night.
Inside were boxes of documents.
Photographs.
Hard drives.
Old company records.
And a notebook.
The first page contained a sentence written in Dylan's handwriting.
I know what Dad did to Daniel.
I stared at it for several seconds.
What had Dad done to me?
The next page answered.
Five years earlier, I had been accused of leaking confidential architecture documents to a competitor.
I had insisted I was innocent.
An internal investigation cleared me.
I thought the matter had ended.
According to Dylan's notebook, it hadn't.
My father had planted the evidence.
Why?
Because he needed me removed from a project.
A project called Blackline.
I sat on the floor.
My brother had known.
And he'd kept it secret.
The next page made everything worse.
Dad told me Daniel could never be allowed near the board.
Then:
He wants Dylan in Daniel's position because Dylan won't ask questions.
My hands shook.
Then I found a photograph.
My father standing beside three men outside a warehouse.
One of them was the CFO of Halcyon.
Another was a private security contractor.
The third man was unfamiliar.
But beneath the photograph Dylan had written:
The real boss.
I turned the page.
A name.
Elias Grant.
I knew it immediately.
Elias Grant was the founder of Meridian Capital, the investment group that owned thirty-eight percent of Halcyon.
He also happened to be Rachel's estranged father.
I called her.
When I said the name, she went silent.
“You need to come to my house,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I know who Elias is.”
When I arrived, Rachel locked the door behind me.
“My father doesn't care about Halcyon,” she said.
“Then what does he care about?”
“Control.”
She showed me a photograph.
Elias standing beside Victor.
They were shaking hands.
The picture had been taken twelve years earlier.
Rachel pointed to the bottom.
“That's the date.”
I looked.
The date was one month before Dylan was born.
Then Rachel said:
“My father didn't invest in Halcyon.”
She swallowed.
“He built it.”
My phone rang.
It was Detective Ortiz.
“Daniel, we found your brother.”
“Where?”
“At an abandoned factory.”
“Is he alive?”
A pause.
“Yes.”
Relief hit me.
Then Ortiz said:
“But he isn't alone.”
My blood went cold.
May you like
“Who is with him?”
“Your father.”
