Chapter 4: What Marcus Left Behind
The lead vehicle took me to a hotel twenty minutes from the house.
The Army had booked it — a quiet room on the fourth floor with a view of bare November trees and a heating unit that worked.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time without taking off my coat.
The baby moved.
I pressed one hand against my side.
"I know," I said quietly.
"I know."
My phone buzzed.
A text from an unknown number that I recognized immediately as Victoria's secondary line — the one she used when she didn't want a record.
*We need to talk.
Not about the money.
About Marcus.*
I set the phone face-down on the nightstand.
Forty minutes later, someone knocked.
I opened the door.
It was not Victoria.
It was a man I had never seen in person but recognized from a photograph Marcus had kept in the back of his field journal — a photograph I had found three weeks after his passing when I was going through his personal effects.
The man in the doorway was older now, maybe sixty, with the kind of posture that never entirely leaves a person who has served.
He wore civilian clothes and carried nothing except a plain manila envelope.
"Colonel," he said.
"My name is Warren Gault.
I was Marcus's handler for the last two years of his career." He paused.
"He asked me to find you if anything happened to him.
It took me longer than it should have.
I'm sorry."
I stepped back from the door.
He came in and sat in the chair by the window.
I stayed standing.
"What's in the envelope?" I asked.
"Letters.
Three of them." He set it on the small table beside the chair.
"One for you.
One for the child — he asked that you hold it until they're old enough.
And one addressed to your father."
I looked at the envelope.
"Harrison?"
"Marcus wrote it six months before the mission.
He said he'd been carrying something for a long time and he didn't want it to follow the child into the world." Warren folded his hands.
"He didn't tell me what was in it.
But he was very specific that Harrison should receive it only after the estate was settled.
Not before."
I crossed the room and picked up the envelope.
My name was on the outside in Marcus's handwriting — the same handwriting I had watched fill a hundred field reports, grocery lists, birthday cards.
My hands didn't shake.
I had trained them not to.
"Did anyone else know you were coming here?" I asked.
"No."
"Did anyone follow you?"
Warren's expression shifted slightly.
"I took precautions.
But your brother-in-law made three phone calls in the last hour.
One to a family attorney.
One to a private investigator.
And one to a number I wasn't able to trace in time."
I set the envelope down.
"Raymond."
"He's moving fast," Warren said.
"Faster than someone acts when they're just angry about money."
I looked at him.
"What do you mean?"
Warren was quiet for a moment.
He looked out at the bare trees.
"Marcus flagged Raymond fourteen months ago," he said carefully.
"He didn't tell me why.
He just asked me to keep a record of the name." He paused again.
"Colonel — how well do you actually know your brother-in-law?"
The heating unit clicked on.
May you like
Outside, the trees didn't move.
"Apparently not well enough," I said.
