Vows of Vengeance

Chapter 2

I stayed on the hallway floor for a long time.

Long enough for the weak grey light outside the apartment to brighten into morning.

I sat there with her letter resting open in my lap and the photograph balanced between my fingers, staring at the younger version of my father beside Dominic Blackwell and thinking, irrationally, that he looked happy.

That unsettled me more than anything else.

Because the version of my father I remembered before his death was exhausted. Quiet in a way that always felt strained, like someone listening constantly for danger nobody else could hear. Looking at the photograph now, at the ease in his posture and the absence of fear in his expression, I realized there had once been a period of his life untouched by whatever destroyed him.

Eventually I stood and placed the letter and photograph carefully on the hallway shelf beside the open wooden box. I walked into the bathroom, splashed cold water against my face, then gripped the sink and looked at myself in the mirror.

I thought about the letter again.

Your father did not choose to die.

Six words.

Six years rearranged in a single sentence.

I had always known something about my father’s death felt wrong. My mother and I never spoke about it directly.

But suspicion is survivable.

Confirmation is different.

Then I heard Leo’s key turning in the lock.

A second later he stepped into the apartment.

He already looked devastated.

Some people become unreadable when they grieve. Leo never did. At twenty three he still carried sadness the same way he had at nine, openly and without defense.

I watched understanding settle over him before either of us spoke.

He crossed the apartment in three quick steps and wrapped his arms around me so suddenly it knocked the breath from my chest. I held onto him automatically.

That had always been our way.

We were not a family that explained pain aloud. We sat beside it quietly until it became something we could carry.

I made coffee because I did not know what else to do with my hands. Leo sat at the kitchen table while I gathered hospital documents and answered calls from relatives I barely heard.

We talked about practical things. Whether he should stay at the apartment.

I did not tell him about the box.

I did not tell him about the letter or Dominic Blackwell’s name folded carefully back inside the envelope upstairs.

The next several days passed in a blur of exhaustion. Forms. Calls. Signatures. Meetings. Flowers. Questions repeated so often they began sounding mechanical.

I moved through all of it steadily.

Function first.

Collapse later.

After the funeral, Leo stayed at the apartment, sleeping on the couch despite my repeated attempts to convince him to take the bed.

After he fell asleep each night, I sat at my desk and researched the Blackwells.

Dominic Blackwell’s face appeared everywhere once I started looking for it. Articles describing him as visionary, ruthless, disciplined, transformative.

The Blackwell Group was enormous. Real estate, finance, media, infrastructure, private investments. The deeper I looked, the more impossible it became to separate the company from the functioning of the city itself.

Then there was the family.

Celeste Blackwell appeared in photographs wearing expressions so composed they revealed almost nothing. Beside her stood Caden Blackwell more often than not, severe and perfectly put together. Articles described him as the future of the empire. Brilliant. Controlled. Untouchable.

Something about him unsettled me immediately.

He looked like someone who had spent his life learning how not to reveal weakness.

River Blackwell was different entirely. Easier smile. Messier reputation. Headlines involving nightlife scandals and disappearing from board meetings before reappearing months later looking unconcerned by whatever trouble he caused.

The articles framed him like harmless distraction beside his older brother.

I did not believe that for a second.

On the sixth day after my mother’s funeral, I found the drive.

First I searched obvious places. My father’s desk. Storage boxes. Coat pockets. Nothing.

By evening I had dismantled half my mother’s bedroom and gained nothing except frustration.

Then I remembered the watches.

I was twelve the first time my father showed them to me. Four watches laid carefully across his desk. One looked expensive. One elegant. One modern.

The fourth looked almost worthless.

I remembered asking why he kept it.

My father smiled and said, “Appearance and value are almost never the same thing.”

Years later, standing in my mother’s bedroom, I realized he had been teaching me how he hid things.

I looked toward the bookshelf above her bed. At the worn paperback shoved sideways near the end of the shelf.

I pulled it free.

The pages had been hollowed out.

Inside sat a black flash drive.

For a moment I simply stared at it resting there inside the cut pages, something ordinary carrying the weight of six years of silence.

Holding it in my palm, I felt the enormity of what my father must have done to create this. The secrecy. The patience. The fear he must have lived with while collecting evidence dangerous enough to hide from people powerful enough to destroy him.

And despite that, he kept going.

What unsettled me most was realizing he must have believed I would eventually find it.

Not the police.

Not lawyers.

Me.

I turned the drive once between my fingers and glanced toward my laptop on the desk across the room.

If my father had hidden this carefully, opening it carelessly would be stupid.

I slipped the drive into my pocket instead.

I sat there a little longer in the quiet, one hand resting against the drive in my pocket, and for the first time since opening the box in the hallway, I felt something sharper than grief beginning to take shape inside me.

Purpose.

Then I stood, walked into the kitchen, and made coffee.

This time, I drank it.

Nothing about my life felt ordinary anymore either.