The Forgotten Heir

Chapter 6: The Price of Silence

"I'm listening," Daniel said, though his voice made it clear he wasn't looking forward to whatever came next.

Gerald pulled out a chair and sat down across from him like this was any other business meeting, setting his coffee down with the satisfaction of a man who believed he'd already won.

"Marcus tells me there are people, serious people, who would pay a great deal for discreet medical care. No paperwork. No hospital records. The kind of care that apparently only a handful of people on this earth can provide." He spread his hands. "I'm not asking you to do anything you haven't already done. Just do it for clients I introduce you to, and let me handle the arrangements. A modest f*e for my trouble, of course."

"No," Daniel said.

Gerald's smile didn't move, but something behind his eyes went cold.

"I don't think you understand the position you're in, Daniel."

"I understand it perfectly. You want to sell access to a woman lying convulsing on your floor twelve hours ago as though it were a service you arranged. I won't be your product, Gerald."

"Then perhaps," Gerald said, leaning back, "you'd prefer I make a few calls of my own. Marcus mentioned a name last night. The Verity Order. I don't fully understand what it is, but I understand enough to know that whoever wants to find you badly enough will pay handsomely for a name and an address. I imagine that's worth quite a lot more than a medical referral f*e."

The kitchen went very quiet.

Mira's hand tightened around her mug. "Dad, you can't-"

"I can do whatever I like in my own house," Gerald said, not unkindly, which somehow made it worse. "I'm simply pointing out that Daniel has two options here. He can be useful to me, quietly, profitably, and privately. Or he can be a rumor I mention to the wrong person at the wrong dinner party, and let whatever happens next happen. Either way, I get something out of this arrangement. I'd simply prefer it not involve headlines."

Daniel studied him for a long moment, and something in his posture shifted, subtle enough that only Mira, who had spent three years learning to read every version of her husband's stillness, noticed it happen. It wasn't anger. It was closer to recognition, the particular calm of a man recalculating a threat he'd underestimated.

"You think I'm afraid of what you know," Daniel said quietly.

"I think you should be."

"I've had people with far more resources than you try to find me over the last three years, Gerald. Governments, some of them. None of them succeeded, because the people who taught me how to disappear were better at it than anyone in your social circle could imagine." Daniel's voice never rose, which made it land harder than shouting ever could have. "What you're proposing isn't a business arrangement. It's a threat against my wife's safety, dressed up as a favor to me. I'd think very carefully before making a call like that."

Gerald's confidence flickered, just slightly, like a man realizing partway through a poker hand that he might not actually hold the cards he thought he did.

"Are you threatening me?"

"No." Daniel stood, unhurried, and picked up his coffee mug from the table. "I'm telling you what happens to people who threaten things that don't belong to them. I've seen it happen more times than I'd like to remember. I'd rather you heard it from me first, as a courtesy, than learned it the hard way."

He left the kitchen without waiting for a response, Mira close behind him, leaving Gerald alone at the table with his coffee going cold and a growing, uncomfortable sense that he had just badly misjudged the man he'd spent three years calling a freeloader.

Upstairs, Mira caught Daniel's arm before he reached their bedroom.

"Was that true? What you said down there?"

"Every word."

"Then why," she asked, "do you look like you're not sure you believe it yourself?"

Daniel was quiet for a long moment, staring down the hallway toward the window where, eighteen months ago, he'd made a promise to a dying man that he had failed to keep once already.

"Because your father just did something I hoped nobody in this family would ever do," he said. "He made himself a target too."