Chapter 19 - The Ghost of Colette
I dove into the SUV as Mateo hit the accelerator. A bullet shattered the rear passenger window, spraying reinforced glass pellets across the leather interior, but the armored plating took the brunt of the fire. The vehicle fishtailed onto Commonwealth Avenue, tires screaming against the slick asphalt before gripping and rocketing toward Storrow Drive.
I lay gasping on the floorboards, my face pressed against the floor mat, clutching my ribs where I had bruised them against the door frame.
"Claire! Are you hit?" Mateo yelled, checking his rearview mirror as he swerved through the midnight traffic, his hands white-knuckled on the wheel.
"No," I choked out, hauling myself into the bucket seat and shaking glass out of my hair. "No. I'm intact."
"They breached the harbor perimeter twenty minutes ago," Mateo said, his jaw locked in fury. "Julian Moreau landed a private chopper at Logan under a diplomatic manifest. He’s not playing corporate raider anymore. He knows the trust amendments are dead, and he knows the Cayman freeze is lifting. He’s hunting."
I pulled the soaked manila envelope from my leather jacket. The edges were crumpled, but the paper inside remained dry. With trembling hands, I turned on the overhead reading light and held up the birth certificate.
Mateo glanced sideways, his eyes widening as his gaze swept across the name typed beneath the Massachusetts seal.
*Mother: Colette Moreau.*
"My God," Mateo whispered. "It wasn't a rumor."
"You knew?" I demanded, my voice cracking with an unbearable surge of grief and anger. "You knew who she was?"
"I knew Arthur spent four years in Marseilles before he married Eleanor," Mateo said softly, his voice heavy with regret. "My father was Arthur’s harbor master back then. Dad told me Arthur was madly in love with a French shipping heiress named Colette. But the Moreau patriarch—Julian’s father—refused the union. The Moreaus considered the Bennetts dirty American dockyard upstarts. When Colette supposedly died in that car crash, Arthur came home a ghost. Six months later, he married Eleanor Vance to merge their shipping lines."
"Eleanor knew," I whispered, the brutal reality settling into my bones like lead. "From the very first day. She looked at me for thirty-one years and saw the woman my father actually loved. That’s why she gave Vanessa the designer clothes while I got boarding school uniforms. That’s why she smiled while Vanessa yanked my luggage out of the Cabo master suite and dumped it in the hallway. It wasn't favoritism. It was vengeance."
"And Julian?" Mateo asked, taking the exit toward a private hangar outside Bedford.
"Julian didn't come to New York to rescue Eleanor or help Vanessa," I said, unfolding Dad's letter. "Julian came because my mother was the majority shareholder of Moreau Continental Maritime. When she vanished, her shares disappeared into an offshore trust Arthur created. That trust is tied to my legal identity. Julian can't touch a single euro of the European fleet without my signature—or my death certificate."
I looked out into the black, storm-swept highway. The family that had degraded me, the sister who had stepped on my neck for thirty years, and the mother who had treated me like a parasite—they were all pawns in a war Arthur Bennett had started before I took my first breath.
"Turn the car around, Mateo," I said, my voice hardening until it sounded like steel striking stone.
May you like
Mateo frowned, glancing at me in the glow of the dashboard. "Claire, Lucian and his crew are scouring Boston. We need to get you to the safehouse in Rhode Island."
"No," I replied, staring straight ahead. "Eleanor is still at the Mandarin Oriental penthouse. She thinks Julian is her white knight. She thinks she's about to be restored to high society while I rot. I want the truth from her mouth. And then I’m going to take everything she has left."
