Chapter 3 - The Portrait and the Past
My father’s house smelled of roasted rosemary, old leather, and expensive cedar—a familiar scent that had defined every holiday of my childhood. But when I unlocked the front door using the spare key I’d kept in my glove compartment, the house was dead silent.
There was no lingering warmth from a Christmas gathering, no festive music playing softly in the background, and no sign of the shattered wineglass from the night before. Someone had cleaned it up meticulously.
"Dad?" I called out, closing the heavy oak door behind me.
No answer. The house was empty.
I walked down the hallway past the formal dining room, where the table had been stripped bare, leaving only a polished mahogany surface that reflected the gray winter light filtering through the tall windows. My heart beat with a slow, heavy rhythm against my ribs. I felt like an intruder in the home I had grown up in, a stranger stepping into a life that had moved on without me.
I headed straight for the study at the end of the hall.
The door was unlocked. I pushed it open, stepping onto the thick Persian rug. The room was dominated by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a massive oak desk covered in neat stacks of financial reports. And there, above the fireplace, hung the oil painting of my grandfather—his painted eyes staring down with the same unblinking gravity I remembered from my youth.
I walked over to the fireplace, reached up, and gripped the heavy wooden frame of the portrait. With a slight pull, the canvas hinged forward on hidden brass pivots, revealing a small, black digital safe set directly into the brickwork.
I didn't have the combination.
Standing there in the quiet room, a wave of frustration washed over me. What did I expect to find? A smoking gun? A ledger detailing illicit transactions? It all felt absurd, the product of a paranoid phone call from a woman I had never met. I reached out to push the portrait back into place, ready to leave, when my eye caught a faint scratch on the wooden desk directly beneath the mantel.
It wasn't an old scratch. The wood fibers were still pale and exposed, as if something heavy had been dragged across it very recently.
I knelt down and checked the lower shelf of the bookcase beside the desk. Tucked behind a row of leather-bound legal statutes was a small, black flash drive.
My fingers brushed against the plastic casing. I pulled it out, turning it over in my palm. It was an encrypted military-grade drive—the exact kind the firm used for secure off-site data transfers.
"Looking for something, Liam?"
I spun around so fast my knee cracked against the edge of the desk.
Jason stood in the doorway. He wasn't wearing his usual tailored holiday suit; he wore a rumpled wool sweater, and his hair was uncombed. He looked smaller than he had on television, his shoulders slightly hunched, his eyes bloodshot. He wasn't holding a weapon, but the look he gave me was far more dangerous than anger. It was the look of a cornered animal trying to calculate its escape.
"Jason," I said, slowly straightening up while keeping my hand closed around the flash drive in my pocket. "You look like hell."
"And you look like a national hero," Jason replied, his voice flat, devoid of the smug superiority I was used to. He walked slowly into the room, stopping a few feet away from me. "Dad’s out. He went to the country club to do damage control after your little stunt on the highway yesterday. He thinks if he drinks enough scotch with the board members, everyone will forget you made our family name a trending topic."
"I was doing my job, Jason. People were trapped."
"You always have to be the savior, don't you?" Jason laughed, a dry, humorless sound. "Ever since we were kids, it wasn't enough for you to just exist. You had to go to West Point, you had to deploy, you had to come back covered in ribbons while I sat in an office crunching numbers."
"This isn't about childhood jealousy, Jason," I said, taking a step forward. "Erica called me."
Jason flinched. The color drained entirely from his face, leaving his skin a sickly gray. For a second, he looked like he might actually fall over.
"She told you about the firm," he whispered.
"She told me enough to make me curious," I replied, pulling the flash drive out of my pocket and holding it up where he could see it. "And finding this sitting behind your legal books makes me think she wasn't lying."
Jason stared at the small piece of plastic in my hand, and then a slow, terrible smile crept across his lips.
"You think that drive is your ticket to being the good guy, Liam?" he asked softly. "You think you've uncovered a neat little corporate crime you can hand over to your buddies in federal law enforcement?"
"Isn't it?"
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"Open it," Jason whispered, taking another step closer. "Plug it into that laptop on the desk and read the beneficiary names on those accounts. Because the moment you do, you won't just be exposing me. You'll be destroying the man who paid for your college, your training, and every single medal on your uniform."
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