Page 186 of Dance With A Devil
A four-digit code flashes across the cold steel of the safe. Of course he’d protect his secrets behind numbers, my father always did love puzzles soaked in pain.
“You have any idea what the passcode could be?” Wells asks, eyeing the keypad like he’s ready to rip it off the fucking wall.
I stare at it for a moment. My jaw tightens.
“Yeah… I’ve got a guess.”
I punch in the date he sent me away, like I was nothing. Like I was a problem to be discarded.
Click.
The lock surrenders.
“Figures,” I mutter, dead inside. “Even his lies are memorialized.”
Wells lets out a bitter laugh. “What a sick fucking bastard.”
I open it. Piles of cash, forged passports, burner phones, contracts, and files stacked like bones in a crypt. We start digging, page after page, life after life my father touched, twisted, or ruined.
Then I see it.
A file. No markings. Just thick.
I crack it open and everything in me stills.
“Looks like dear old, Daddy isn’t the top dog he thought he was.”
Wells glances over. “What do you mean?”
I pull a paper free, one with a faded insignia and a name in blood-red ink. “You remember how they used to beat it into our skulls? That they were the Elders of F.U.C.K. and the founding Devils of Cliffside?”
“Every damn day of our lives.”
I hand it over. “Turns out that was a lie. According to this, the real founder was someone namedNikolai. No last name. No photo. No trail. Just… vanished.”
Wells frowns, turning the page. “This says he went off-grid over twenty years ago. No one’s seen him since.”
“Dash might be able to dig something up. If not, no one can.”
We start snapping pictures of everything, his lies, his debts, his desperation. This place is a mausoleum of failure wrapped in a silk suit.
And then I find it.
A file labeledWalker.
The second I open it, my lungs forget how to breathe.
Photographs. Dozens of them.Athens, at school, in her classroom, at the coffee shop, walking to her car. Some are weeks old. Some are from thenight I touched her in her office.
“What the fuck?” I growl, each image fueling the inferno building in my gut.
“Who got this close?” I demand. “Who got into her life without us knowing?”
Wells leans in, jaw locked. “They’ve been tracking her longer than we thought.”
And then it gets worse.
I find a will. Signed by Henry and Kaia Walker.
