Vengeance Wears No Crown

CHAPTER 6

Uncle Daniel.

The man who taught me to throw a punch the summer before everything fell apart. Who used to sit at our kitchen table across from my mother, laughing at some old joke only the two of them understood, who vanished into grief so completely that nobody in the family ever heard from him again and everyone simply accepted it, because grief does strange things to people and nobody wanted to push a broken man for answers.

I hadn't thought about him in years. Now his name sat in front of me on Wren's screen, tied to a shell company that bought the land under a lighthouse that burned down two years after my mother's death, destroying whatever evidence she might have hidden there.

"It could be a coincidence," I said, even though I didn't believe it, needing to hear someone argue the other side before I let myself fully accept it.

"It could be," Wren allowed, though her tone made clear she thought otherwise. "Shell company ownership isn't proof of arson. But combined with the timing, and combined with what Feld told you tonight, it's not a coincidence I'm comfortable ignoring."

Cross returned twenty minutes later, having delivered Feld to whatever hiding place he'd arranged, and found me still staring at the screen, at my uncle's name buried three shell companies deep in a paper trail nobody was ever supposed to find.

"You look like you saw a ghost," he said.

"Might have." I filled him in while Wren pulled up everything her network could find on Daniel Mercer, which turned out to be almost nothing. No employment records after the year my mother died. No property in his name. No utility bills, no bank accounts under the identity that had once belonged to my father's brother, as if the man had simply stopped existing the moment Elena Mercer's coffin went into the ground.

"That's not grief," Wren said, half to herself, scrolling through the empty results. "That's someone who knows exactly how to disappear and had the resources to do it clean. Grief doesn't erase a paper trail this thoroughly. Money does."

"So either Daniel Mercer ran because he knew something and was afraid of the same people who killed his sister," I said slowly, working through it the way I'd learned to work through every impossible problem Meridian had ever handed me, "or he ran because he's the reason she's dead, and disappearing was easier than facing what he'd done."

"There's a third option," Wren said quietly. "He didn't run at all. Someone made it look like he did, and he's been dead just as long as your mother, buried somewhere nobody's ever thought to look because everyone accepted the story that grief drove him away."

The thought settled over the room like a weight none of us wanted to be the first to lift.

"I need to know which one it is," I said. "Before I move on Draycott, before I touch Hallow Ridge, before any of it. If my uncle is alive and involved in my mother's death, I need to know that before I trust anyone who shares my blood."

"And if he's a victim instead of a killer?" Cross asked.

"Then I owe him the same thing I owe my mother. The truth, and whatever justice I can still give him."

Wren was quiet for a moment, then turned back to her screen with renewed focus, the particular energy she gets when a problem has shifted from difficult to merely complicated. "I have an idea. The bookshop Feld mentioned, on Kessler Street. If he's been leaving messages and receiving them there for ten years, there's a chance he's not the only one using that channel. People who go quiet the way your uncle did sometimes leave a thread somewhere, in case they ever want to be found again without announcing it to the whole city."

"You think Daniel might have used the same shop."

"I think it's worth checking before we assume the worst." She was already pulling up a street map, marking the location. "But Kade, we still need to move on Hallow Ridge. Every day we spend chasing your uncle's ghost is another day your sister spends behind that fence, and I don't like how quiet Draycott's people have gone since that car followed Feld tonight. Quiet isn't good. Quiet means they're deciding what to do about us."

She was right, and the tension of it sat heavy in my chest, two threads pulling in opposite directions, my sister waiting behind a fence and my mother's killer possibly waiting behind a name I used to trust completely.

"We do both," I said. "Cross, first thing tomorrow, you're on Hallow Ridge. I want eyes on every shift change, every delivery truck, every weakness in that perimeter before we make a move. Wren, you're on the bookshop and anything else that might lead us to Daniel, alive or otherwise."

"And you?" Wren asked.

"I'm going to find Sienna Voss," I said. "If she's the only person inside that facility who's ever questioned how my sister's been treated, I need to know if she can be trusted before we build a plan around getting Nadia out."

Cross raised an eyebrow, the closest he ever comes to visible skepticism. "You're going to walk up to a Draycott-adjacent doctor and ask her to help you break a patient out of a locked facility."

"No." I stood, already running through the version of myself I'd need to be for this, someone with no name the Draycotts would recognize, nothing that would connect back to the boy who'd vanished from Ironport a decade ago. "I'm going to become someone she has a reason to trust, and let her decide on her own that something at Hallow Ridge is wrong enough to help fix it."

Wren studied me for a long moment, something unreadable behind her eyes. "That's a dangerous game, Kade. People get hurt when you let them get close enough to matter."

"I know," I said. "It's a risk I'm taking anyway."

Because somewhere behind a locked gate eleven miles from where I stood, my sister was waiting for someone to finally come back for her, and I was done being the person who arrived too late.