Chapter 4 - THE DEAD WOMAN'S LAST DELIVERY
June Avery had taught Fay how to wire trailing jasmine, how to bargain with cemetery managers, how to make old hydrangeas drink again, and how to spot trouble before it touched your shoulder.
The fact that June was dead made the entire world feel like it had slipped one inch to the side.
“You’re lying.”
Fay said it because she needed to say something.
Not because she believed it.
Griffin handed the phone to the man beside the door, then looked at her with that same infuriating steadiness.
“I gain nothing by lying about a dead florist.”
Fay’s hands curled into fists.
“She was fine when I saw her.”
“She may have been. She isn’t now.”
“She sent me here.”
“Yes.”
“And now she’s dead.”
“Yes.”
The world narrowed down to that one word.
Griffin moved toward the table and tapped the screen beside Simon Lawson’s name. New images appeared—security stills from the hotel loading area. June. Her van. A second figure in a dark coat partly obscured by service carts. Brandon Cole entering the east corridor. Brandon leaving alone.
Fay looked up.
“He did something to her.”
“Possibly.”
“Possibly?” Her voice cracked with anger. “He cornered me!”
“He also recognized your shears.”
That stopped her.
Griffin zoomed in on one still image—Brandon’s gaze angled not toward her face, but toward the green handle clipped to her apron.
“He didn’t choose you randomly,” Griffin said. “He knew what those shears were.”
Fay shook her head.
“They’re gardening tools.”
“No,” Griffin said quietly. “They’re Simon Lawson’s.”
He said her father’s name as if it opened doors Fay had spent half her life told were permanently shut.
“Who was my father to you?”
The question sat in the room.
Griffin leaned one hip against the table, arms folding loosely across his chest.
“My father trusted him.”
That answer was not what she expected.
“I thought you said he stole from you.”
“I said I’ve been looking for the tool since I was twenty-five. Simon Lawson disappeared the night my father Dominic was killed. Before disappearing, he took something my father had spent years creating.”
“The ledger?”
“The Black Iris Ledger.”
He said the words flatly, as if naming a weather system. Fay had never heard them before tonight, but the way he said them suggested other men in the city had spent years saying them in lower voices.
“What is it?” she asked.
Griffin was silent just long enough to tell her he disliked explanations.
“It is a record of hidden money,” he said at last. “Political payments. judges bought. companies moved through proxies. men who wore clean suits by day and signed dirty orders by night. My father kept it because he trusted paper more than people. Simon was supposed to guard it. The night Dominic died, Simon vanished and the full ledger vanished with him.”
Fay stared.
“My father was an accountant?”
“He was more careful than most accountants.”
“And you think he killed your father.”
Griffin’s eyes sharpened.
“I think many people benefited from Dominic Hales dying. Simon may have been a thief, a witness, or a man running for his life. If I knew which, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
That answer disturbed her more because it did not overclaim. He was not forcing a simple villain onto a dead man he hated. He was leaving room for complication—and that made him more believable.
“I never knew any of this.”
“Perhaps.”
“There you go again.”
“Go where?”
“Talking like every answer is a maybe so you can call me a liar later.”
Something almost like approval flickered in Griffin’s expression.
“Most people in this city ask for certainty they can weaponize. You’re asking for honesty.”
Fay laughed bitterly.
“You buried me in a basement.”
“The Grave is a secure hold, not a basement.”
“Oh, well, what a comforting distinction.”
One of his guards entered again.
“Sir.”
He used that tone people use when the next thing is both urgent and unpleasant.
Griffin took the tablet from the table and read the message that had been pushed to it. Then he said to the guard, “Show me.”
The man turned the screen so Fay could see.
A grainy image from a traffic camera. A dark sedan idling outside a modest row house on Carson Street.
Her house.
No, not hers anymore. Her mother’s. Where Owen still lived while finishing classes.
A timestamp from twelve minutes earlier.
Fay went cold.
“That’s my mother’s place.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Because the sedan is registered to one of Brandon Cole’s shell companies.”
The room tilted for one sickening second.
“He knows who I am.”
“He knows enough.”
Fay looked at Griffin.
“My family has nothing to do with this.”
“Brandon may disagree.”
“You need to call the police.”
“I have already sent two men.”
She blinked.
“What?”
“Your mother and brother are being moved now.”
Fay stared at him as if language itself had briefly stopped making sense.
“You sent men to my house?”
“Yes.”
“Without asking me?”
“Would you rather I asked you while Brandon got there first?”
She hated that she had no good answer fast enough.
Griffin saw it, and because he was Griffin Hales, he used the silence.
“This is the part you need to understand, Fay. The moment Brandon recognized those shears, your life stopped belonging to the small scale you’re used to. June Avery is dead. Your family home is being watched. And you still think the worst thing that happened tonight was a kiss gone wrong.”
Fay swallowed hard.
Then she looked him dead in the face and said the truest thing she had.
“No,” she whispered. “The worst thing that happened tonight is that I can’t tell whether you’re helping me or taking my turn.”
Griffin did not answer.
He only tapped the guard’s phone screen once.
A new message appeared.
HOME EMPTY. BACK DOOR OPEN. NO FAMILY INSIDE. ONE NOTE LEFT.
His gaze lifted to hers.
“Your brother and mother are already gone,” he said.
Then he turned the screen.
May you like
The note had only six words, scrawled in block capitals across torn cardboard.
SEND THE GIRL OR BURY THE BOY.
