Chapter 7 - Five Chairs
I don't remember leaving the house.
I remember the car moving.
I remember Claire beside me.
I remember four girls crying in the back seat because Ethan had spent one afternoon treating them like annoying little sisters and apparently that was enough to make him family.
Mostly, I remember one sentence.
Mercer wants Ethan.
The photograph contained metadata.
Deliberately.
An address.
Mercer wanted me to come.
The building looked abandoned.
Inside was the blue room.
Exactly as Ethan remembered.
Blue walls.
Silver moon.
Five chairs.
Ethan occupied the fifth.
Unhurt.
Mercer stood behind him.
I stopped in the doorway.
“You wanted me.”
“Yes.”
“Then release him.”
“No.”
My guards spread behind me.
Mercer laughed.
“Alexander Hayes brought an army to rescue one child.”
“My child.”
“Exactly.”
He pressed a button.
Screens illuminated.
Videos appeared.
Catherine.
Years earlier.
Sitting in the blue room.
She looked directly into the camera.
“Alexander, if you're watching this, I failed.”
My chest tightened.
Mercer watched me instead of the screen.
Catherine continued.
“I built this program because I believed powerful men shouldn't automatically control children simply because courts feared them.”
Fair.
“Then I realized I was becoming another person deciding children's lives without asking them.”
She admitted Mercer corrupted the system.
Admitted she had participated longer than she should have.
Admitted Michael helped her gather evidence.
Then she said something unexpected.
“I was preparing to leave you.”
Ethan looked at me.
I couldn't move.
“I loved you. But I was afraid of what our son would become if fear was the language he learned from his father.”
That one landed.
Mercer smiled.
I wanted to break his face.
Instead, I listened.
Catherine's final message ended differently.
“But Alexander is not Richard Mercer.”
Mercer's smile vanished.
“He can change.”
She looked into the camera.
“If he ever learns that protection without choice is another form of control, trust him.”
The screen went black.
Mercer looked furious.
“You edited that.”
Michael's voice came from the doorway.
“No.”
Everyone turned.
My brother stood there.
Older.
Scar across his jaw.
Alive.
He pointed a gun at Mercer.
“I kept the original.”
Claire whispered his name.
Michael looked at her.
Then at his daughters.
Everything in his face collapsed.
Ellie ran.
“Daddy!”
Mercer moved.
Too fast.
He grabbed Ethan and pressed a concealed blade near his shoulder.
Nobody fired.
“Drop it!”
Michael lowered his weapon.
So did I.
Mercer smiled again.
“You people still don't understand.”
“What?”
“Catherine didn't die because she discovered my operation.”
He looked directly at me.
“She died because she discovered who financed it.”
“Who?”
Mercer laughed.
“Your organization.”
My blood went cold.
He threw a ledger toward me.
Hayes accounts.
Hayes shell companies.
My signature.
Money financing the blue-room program for years.
Impossible.
Then I recognized the authorization code.
Only three people possessed it.
Me.
Catherine.
And the man who had managed my finances since I was twenty-two.
My uncle Raymond Hayes.
The man currently sitting inside my mansion with four girls and Claire's security team.
Claire realized it at the same moment.
She screamed:
May you like
“The girls!”
Then the lights went out.
