Chapter 4 - The Threat in Broad Daylight
By 8:00 AM, Damian had vanished. His car was gone from the driveway, and his suit bag was missing from the closet. He had left a scrawled note on the kitchen counter: *Going to the office to fix this. Don't do anything stupid.*
"Stupid," I muttered, crumpling the paper.
At 9:15 AM, my phone rang with an unknown local number.
I tapped speaker. "Iris."
"We need to talk, Iris. Alone." Maribel’s voice was completely stripped of yesterday’s hysterical edge. It was smooth, venomous, and chillingly controlled. "Café Rue. The patio at the back. You have twenty minutes, or I send an anonymous whistle-blower tip to the Department of Labor alleging that Damian altered safety manifests for personal kickbacks."
"You wouldn't dare," I said. "Your name is on the parent company."
"My name is nowhere near the operating papers, sweetheart. Check the state registry. Arthur put everything under Damian's departmental tax ID. See you in twenty minutes."
The line went dead.
Twenty minutes later, I walked onto the shaded brick patio of Café Rue. The morning air was crisp, carrying the scent of roasting espresso beans and wet pavement.
Maribel sat at a corner table wearing dark oversized sunglasses, a camel-hair coat, and gloves. She looked like a woman who operated in shadows and boardroom boardrooms with equal ease.
I pulled out a chair across from her and sat down. I placed my hands flat on the iron table.
"You haven't changed," I said quietly. "Still running from the smoke."
Maribel took off her glasses. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but her gaze was pure ice. "You cost my family eight million dollars, Iris. You humiliated my father in front of the state legislature. He had a stroke three months after the settlement was signed."
"He had a stroke because his conscience caught up with him," I replied without blinking. "Your negligence burned three young men alive. Logan was twenty-two. He had his whole life ahead of him."
"People die in industrial accidents every day!" she hissed, leaning across the table, her teeth bared. "It was an electrical short! But your little tear-stained crusade made me a pariah. I couldn't get hired anywhere in the Midwest. I had to spend five years rebuilding from scratch under my mother’s name."
"And you built the exact same deathtrap," I said. "Why Damian? Out of all the ambitious fools in the city, why marry your illegal operation to my husband?"
A slow, vicious smile spread across Maribel’s red lips.
"Because it was poetry," she whispered. "When his resume crossed my desk, I recognized the name immediately. You married a weak, desperate man, Iris. He wants to feel powerful so badly he doesn't even look at what he’s stepping on. I didn't have to seduce him. I just told him he was smarter than everyone else, and he handed me the keys to his life."
She leaned closer, tapping her manicured fingernail against the table.
"Here is what is going to happen," Maribel stated. "You will pack your bags and leave Damian. You will sign a nondisclosure agreement drafted by my legal counsel. You will never speak my name, Logan’s name, or Apex Global’s name again. If you do, I will leak Damian’s forged compliance logs. He will go to a federal penitentiary for ten years, and your family home will be seized by the state to pay the fines. Do you understand me?"
I looked at her for five long seconds. Then, I smiled.
May you like
"You really don't know who I've been talking to this morning, do you, Maribel?"
***