Chapter 12 - Grant’s ConfessionGrant asked to see me on the fourth day.
My attorney said no.
Agent Pike said absolutely not.
Marianne, still pale in her hospital bed, said, “Only if you want to, and only if you remember that closure is not something guilty people get to demand from the wounded.”
I went anyway.
Not for closure.
For information.
Grant sat behind reinforced glass in a federal interview room wearing a gray sweatshirt instead of a tailored suit. Without cufflinks, watches, and Blackwood polish, he looked younger. Smaller.
Dangerous still.
But human in a way I resented.
“You came,” he said.
“I’m not here for your feelings.”
His smile was faint.
“No. You never were sentimental when angry.”
“You don’t know me well enough to say what I am.”
That struck him.
Good.
I sat.
Pike stood behind me with a recorder visible on the table.
Grant looked at it.
“Formal, then.”
“Honest,” I said. “For once.”
He leaned back.
“What do you want?”
“Names. Accounts. Anyone who helped Helena move the money.”
“My mother will never let you find it.”
“Your mother is in custody.”
“My mother has been in custody her entire life,” he said. “Manners. Marriage. Reputation. Legacy. She learned to build doors inside cages.”
I did not react.
Grant sighed.
“There’s a banker in Zurich. Alaric Senn. He handled the transfer. But the account won’t stay there. It moves in seventy-two hours.”
“Where?”
“Singapore, then Dubai, then somewhere without a treaty.”
Pike wrote something down.
“Why tell us?” I asked.
Grant looked at me for a long time.
“Because she was going to leave me.”
“You helped her destroy my life because you thought she loved you?”
His face tightened.
“You think I had a choice?”
I almost stood.
Then I saw something in his expression.
Not innocence. Never that.
But history.
“What did Helena do to you?”
Grant laughed once.
“You mean besides raise me?”
I waited.
He looked down at his hands.
“When I was twelve, I told my father I didn’t want the company. I wanted to design boats.” His mouth twisted. “Mother locked me in the old study with merger files and no food for eighteen hours. When I cried, she brought in the board chairman and made me present an acquisition strategy.”
Pike’s expression remained neutral.
Mine did not.
Grant saw the flicker and pounced.
“Don’t pity me.”
“I don’t.”
“Good.”
“Plenty of abused children don’t grow up to marry women as part of financial fraud.”
His eyes sharpened.
There it was.
The wound and the weapon, refusing to separate.
“I tried to warn you,” he said quietly.
“No.”
“At the lake house. Last summer. I told you to walk away from the family.”
“You said that after making me sign trust papers.”
“I changed my mind.”
“You changed tactics.”
His jaw clenched.
Then he leaned forward.
“My mother has a second ledger.”
Pike stopped writing.
Grant continued, “The red one is history. The black one is leverage. Every judge. Every senator. Every federal contractor. If she thinks she’s going down, she’ll burn people powerful enough to burn you first.”
“Where is it?” Pike asked.
Grant looked only at me.
“In the one place my mother believes no woman in this family would dare enter.”
I understood before he said it.
“My bedroom,” I whispered.
May you like
Grant smiled sadly.
“Our bedroom.”
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