She Joked That Everyone Forgot Her Birthday / Chapter 17 / 60

Chapter 17 - The Trial of Blood and Iron

By six o'clock the following morning, the storm had cleared, leaving the city washed in brilliant, crisp autumn sunlight.

In the second-floor master suite of the Beacon Hill mansion, Dr. Sullivan, the Falcone family’s private surgeon, stitched the clean through-and-through bullet wound in Nicholas’s left shoulder.

I hadn't slept for a single second. I sat in a chair beside the four-poster bed, wearing one of Nicholas’s oversized flannel shirts over my jeans, clutching a cup of cold black coffee. Barnaby lay on the rug beside the bed, his chin resting on Nicholas’s polished dress shoes, refusing to close his eyes.

Nicholas opened his eyes as the surgeon finished binding his shoulder in heavy sterile dressings.

His gaze swept the room, immediately finding mine. "Elena."

I dropped the coffee cup onto the nightstand and rushed to his bedside, taking his uninjured hand between both of mine. "I'm here. You're home. The bullet passed through the deltoid without hitting the bone."

Nicholas squeezed my fingers, his grip remarkably strong despite the heavy sedatives. "The documents?"

"Marcus secured all sixty steel lockboxes from Vault 44," I said, a wave of profound relief washing over me. "The bearer bonds are intact. But Nicholas... that wasn't all that was inside the vault."

He frowned, struggling to sit up against the pillows. I placed two extra pillows behind his back, helping him adjust without straining his stitches.

"What else was in there?" he asked.

"The original corporate charter of the Massachusetts Shipping Exchange from 1924," I explained, pulling a velvet-lined folder from my satchel. "Grandfather didn't hide the money to escape federal scrutiny, Nicholas. Victoria lied."

"Why did they hide it, then?"

"They hid it to protect *us*," I said softly, opening the yellowed deed. "Your father and my grandfather anticipated that Victoria and Simon’s foreign syndicate would attempt to privatize the harbor’s public slips. The bearer bonds weren't an escape fund—they were an irrevocable endowment. The trust charter explicitly states that upon the marriage or formal union of the Carter heir and the Falcone heir, the entire three hundred and forty million dollars merges into a sovereign public trust, owned fifty-one percent by the dockworkers' union and forty-nine percent by our joint family office."

Nicholas stared at the document, his dark eyes wide with an emotion I had never seen in him before: pure, unadulterated awe.

"Our fathers planned this," he whispered. "Thirty years ago."

"They knew their children would have to fight this war together," I said, my voice thick with emotion. "And there's more. The federal prosecutor who was on Victoria’s payroll was arrested an hour ago by the FBI. Victoria’s offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and Zurich have been frozen under the Patriot Act. The Vance Syndicate is officially dead, Nicholas. We didn't just win the court case. We severed their head."

Nicholas looked down at our joined hands.

A slow, devastatingly beautiful smile broke across his rugged, exhausted face.

"Marcus!" Nicholas called out.

The security chief stepped through the bedroom door, holding a steaming mug of black coffee. "Sir?"

"Get my tailor here by noon," Nicholas ordered, his voice returning to its commanding, magnetic cadence. "And tell the Union Hall that Miss Carter and I will be addressing the harbor assembly at Pier 9 at six o'clock this evening."

Marcus grinned—a rare, brilliant sight on the former Marine’s battle-hardened face. "The longshoremen are already gathering, boss. Half the city is on the docks waiting to see if you're alive."