Chapter 2 - The Archive and the Eye
The east wing remained locked behind a biometric scanner, but Gabriel didn't stop me when I drifted toward his home office the following afternoon.
The heavy mahogany door was cracked open. Inside, sunlight cut across Persian rugs and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that smelled of old leather and expensive paper. Gabriel sat at his oak desk, surrounded by open ledgers and a laptop glowing with financial spreadsheets.
When my shadow fell across the threshold, he didn't look up immediately.
“If you’re looking for cleaning supplies, Mrs. Gable handled the west wing this morning,” he said, his eyes fixed on a column of numbers.
“I’m not looking for cleaning supplies,” I said, walking into the room and stopping a few feet from his desk. “I’m looking for the rest of that footage.”
Gabriel’s fingers stopped tapping against the keyboard. He leaned back in his leather chair, folding his hands over his flat stomach. The white linen shirt he wore today hid the stitches well, but I could still see the slight hitch in his posture when he moved.
“Which footage?”
“The Golden Room alley. The night you bought me.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “Why do you want to see that? It’s not a masterpiece. It’s just a desperate woman trading human capital for gambling debts.”
“I want to see who else was in the car,” I said evenly. “Chloe was on her phone, but she wasn't texting a friend. She was smiling. Like she had just won something. And Diane... Diane wasn't shaking. She was relieved. Fifty thousand dollars doesn't cover the kind of debt Diane runs up at the tables. My father’s life insurance payout was three times that much, and it vanished in six months.”
Gabriel stood up, walking slowly toward the wall of monitors mounted behind his desk. He pressed a sequence on a concealed keypad beneath the desktop, and the largest screen blinked, shifting from live security feeds of the iron gates to a date-stamped archive file.
04-12-2026 - Golden Room - Rear Alley.
“You have a habit of looking beneath the surface, Nora,” Gabriel murmured, tapping a key.
The video started. The rain was slick and heavy, turning the pavement into a mirror of neon pink and green. The black SUVs pulled up. Diane shoved me forward, my knees hitting the asphalt.
I watched myself fall, watched the split lip, watched the desperate, hollow look in my own eyes. It felt like watching a stranger.
“Pause it there,” I said, stepping closer to the screen.
Gabriel hit the spacebar. The image froze on Chloe, standing under her clear umbrella.
“Zoom in on her phone,” I instructed.
Gabriel’s fingers danced across the control panel. The screen magnified Chloe’s face, then the glowing screen of her smartphone. Reflected in the glass of her phone was not a text thread with a teenager or a boyfriend. It was a mobile banking app showing a incoming wire transfer of $120,000 from an account bearing a name I hadn't heard in years.
“Vance & Associates,” I whispered, the name dropping like lead in my stomach.
“Who is Vance?” Gabriel asked, his voice sharpening.
“My father’s old business partner,” I said, my hands balling into fists at my sides. “When my dad died, Vance was the executor of the estate. He told Diane and me that the business went bankrupt, that there was nothing left after taxes and legal fees. But my dad’s insurance policy... it was supposed to be untouched.”
“It wasn't untouched,” Gabriel concluded, connecting the dots with terrifying speed. “Diane and Vance liquidated everything behind your back. But they ran through it faster than expected. When Diane racked up fifty grand in marker debt at my casino, she didn't have the cash. So Vance arranged a two-part solution: he cleared her immediate liability by having her sell you to me, and he pocketed the rest of the hidden estate funds while you were safely out of the house.”
The silence in the office became deafening.
All the pieces clicked together. The sudden move to a smaller house. The excuses about bills. The way Diane treated me like a ghost long before she sold me to a mafia boss. I wasn't just unwanted; I was an inconvenient witness to a financial crime.
“You want revenge,” Gabriel stated, not as a question, but as an observation.
“I want what’s mine,” I corrected, turning to look him in the eye. “And I want them to realize that trading me for fifty thousand dollars was the worst investment they ever made.”
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Gabriel held my gaze for a long moment. A slow, dangerous smile curved the corners of his mouth.
“Well, Nora,” he said softly, standing up and closing the distance between us until I had to tilt my head back to look at him. “You’re in luck. In my line of work, we don't like people who cheat on their debts. And we really don't like people who steal from my associates.”
