Chapter 5 - The Ambush at Old Hickory Lake
My blood turned to pure liquid nitrogen.
If I hadn't gone to the motel tonight—if I hadn't kicked that door open and carried my feverish son into the rain—Megan, Lucas, and Noah would have been inside that room when those two men kicked the door down.
"Rowan?" Megan asked, noticing the sudden rigidity in my shoulders. "What is it?"
"Stay here," I said, keeping my voice perfectly level. "Don't leave this room. Kenneth," I called toward the door, and Dr. Aris stepped inside immediately. "Lock this wing down. No visitors. If anyone without a hospital badge approaches this door, trigger the code silver alarm."
"Rowan, what's happening?" Megan’s voice rose in panic.
"Claire is cleaning up loose ends," I told her, my eyes locked on the surveillance feed as the two men kicked room twelve's door off its hinges. "She must have found out I visited Vance. She’s trying to erase the evidence before dawn."
I didn't wait for her reply. I walked out of the hospital, took the service elevator straight to the basement garage, and dialed Marcus Vance, my head of personal security, who had been with my family since my father's tenure.
"Marcus," I said as soon as the line clicked. "I need the tactical team at the Sunburst Motor Court on Highway 96 within six minutes. Two men. Black sedan, plates obscured. I want them alive, I want their phones, and I want them in the cellar at Old Hickory Lake before the morning traffic begins."
"Understood, Mr. Bellamy," Marcus replied without asking a single question. "Consider it done."
I didn't drive to the motel. Going there would only tip my hand. Instead, I drove north toward Old Hickory Lake, thirty miles outside the city, where my grandfather’s stone manor sat surrounded by two hundred acres of dense pine forest and high-security iron fencing.
The rain turned into a torrential downpour as I crossed the two-lane bridge over the reservoir. The black water below churned like oil.
By the time I pulled through the wrought-iron gates of the estate, Marcus’s team was already waiting in the circular drive. Two black Suburbans sat with their engines idling, headlights cutting through the sheets of gray rain.
Marcus stepped out, wearing a dark waterproof tactical jacket, his graying hair cropped short.
"They're in the wine cellar," Marcus said, opening the passenger door for me. "They didn't give up easy, but they weren't professionals. Cheap muscle hired through a third-party bail bondsman in East Nashville."
"Did you get the phones?"
Marcus pulled an evidence bag from his coat pocket and handed it to me. Inside were two burner flip phones and a high-end smartphone with a cracked screen.
"The smartphone belongs to the driver," Marcus said. "The last three calls came from a spoofed VOIP number, but our tech traced the IP routing back to a private terminal at the Whitmore residence in Belle Meade."
I stared at the cracked screen through the plastic.
Claire.
She hadn't just tried to frame Megan; she had sent men with an accelerant to burn a condemned motel room with my children inside.
"Bring them up," I said.
Ten minutes later, inside the stone-walled basement of my grandfather's estate, the two men were zip-tied to heavy wooden chairs beneath the bare bulb of an overhead work lamp. The younger one had a split lip and a bruised eye; the older one was shivering from shock, his clothes soaked through with rain and sweat.
On the concrete floor between them lay the red plastic gas can and the crowbar they had carried up those motel stairs.
I pulled up a chair, turned it around, and sat facing them, resting my forearms on the back of the seat.
"Let's make this brief," I said softly. "The woman who hired you told you the room was occupied by a vagrant who was squatting on private land. Is that what she said?"
The older man spat a mouthful of bloody saliva onto the floor. "We don't know who hired us, man. Some guy dropped an envelope with five grand behind the dumpster at the Pilot station on Trinity Lane. Told us to torch the room, make it look like an electrical fire from that piece-of-shit space heater."
"Did he tell you there were babies inside?" I asked.
The younger man froze. His eyes widened, darting between me and the gas can. "Babies? What the hell are you talking about? He said the broad was a junkie who owed money to a loan shark! He said she ran off to Atlanta two days ago and left her junk behind!"
"He lied," I said. "There was a twenty-six-year-old mother and two three-month-old infants in that room. If you had lit that match an hour earlier, you would be facing two counts of capital murder and one count of aggravated arson. In Tennessee, that means lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security."
The color drained from both their faces. The younger one began to shake so violently his knees clicked together.
"We didn't know!" he sobbed. "I swear to God on my mother's soul, we didn't know there were kids! We're just repo guys, man! We do evictions for cash!"
"Who dropped the envelope?" I asked.
"A guy in a silver Lexus," the older one said, his voice cracking with genuine terror. "Tall, thin, wore driving gloves. Had a private security badge clipped to his visor. Said his name was Miller."
Vance Miller.
The investigator had tried to cover his tracks the second I walked out of his office. He had known that if Megan spoke, his entire agency would be dismantled by the district attorney.
"Marcus," I said, standing up.
"Yes, Mr. Bellamy?"
"Take these two into the guest cottage. Give them dry clothes, something hot to eat, and keep them under armed guard. They are state witnesses now. If Vance Miller so much as sneezes in their direction, I want his throat on a platter."
"And Miller?" Marcus asked.
"Pick him up," I said, my voice as cold as the lake outside. "Bring him here. Do not be gentle."
I walked up the stone stairs into the main hall of the manor.
The house was vast, silent, and smelled of polished cedar and beeswax. It had been built in the 1930s by my great-grandfather, a man who believed that wealth was something you fortified behind limestone and iron, not something you flaunted at charity balls.
I pulled out my phone and dialed the number for Arthur Pendelton, the senior managing partner at Pendelton, Croft & Hayes—the law firm that had handled Bellamy family trusts for sixty years.
"Arthur," I said when the old man answered on the fourth ring. "I need you to convene an emergency meeting of the executive board of Bellamy Holdings at six o'clock tomorrow morning."
"Rowan? It's nearly one in the morning. What's happened? Is it the Whitmore merger?"
May you like
"The merger is dead," I said. "And by tomorrow afternoon, Claire Whitmore and her father will be facing grand jury indictments for corporate fraud, criminal conspiracy, and attempted murder."
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