The Padlock on the Mastiff

Relief surged through me so fiercely it almost made me weak. Greg’s carefully maintained lie had finally cracked open. With David’s journal, the safe, and Clara, all I had to do was reach the FBI field office downtown. Greg’s future was a cell, and David might finally be able to come back to us.

The promise shattered beneath the harsh grind of tires over gravel outside the storage building.

I killed the flashlight at once, and darkness swallowed the unit.

“Don’t make a sound,” I breathed, catching Clara by the arms and guiding her behind the huge steel safe.

Barnaby answered with a deep, restrained rumble. The warning vibrated through his chest as he started toward the raised doorway, his nails ticking against the concrete.

Terror seized me. One bark would give us away, and there was nowhere in this unit to run. I grabbed David’s silver whistle from the safe, put it to my mouth, and blew.

Nothing reached my ears. But Barnaby understood. His muzzle closed, and he lowered his giant body to the floor, pressing himself flat against the concrete in complete silence.

A narrow strip of space beneath the partly lifted door showed me headlights moving across broken pavement. A vehicle crept along the row of weathered orange storage doors, slowing as it approached our unit. It stopped several doors away, engine rumbling steadily.

A car door slammed.

Cold shot through my body.

Boots came nearer with patient, measured steps, gravel cracking beneath them.

“Yeah, I’m at the storage facility,” a man said into a phone. His rough voice carried easily through the abandoned industrial park. “Her SUV isn’t here, but some of these units aren’t locked.”

I covered Clara’s mouth and pulled her tight against me. A broad shape crossed the doorway, and I knew him instantly: the man from the dark blue sedan that had waited at the end of my driveway less than half an hour earlier.

“I’m telling you, she wasn’t home,” he muttered, stopping outside Unit 44. “I watched the house for ten minutes. No lights, no vehicles in the garage. She fed you a lie.”

She fed you a lie.

My pulse battered my ribs. His shadow reached across the floor and stopped close enough to Barnaby that I could have counted the steps between them. If he looked inside or switched on a flashlight, we were finished. The storage unit had no rear door.

“All right,” he said after a pause. “I’ll check the rest of this industrial park, then I’ll make a pass by the kid’s elementary school. Tell them to have my remaining payment ready. I don’t work without money, and I don’t hunt phantoms for fun.”

His boots retreated over the gravel. Seconds later, his vehicle door hit shut, the motor snarled, and tires spun hard as the sedan raced away. Its red lights vanished beyond the rows of metal doors.

I slumped against the safe, dragging in the stale air. Clara shook against my chest, her face hidden in my jacket. Barnaby remained motionless, but his eyes shone from the darkness.

“We need to get out of here,” I whispered. My fingers trembled so badly that holding the flashlight felt impossible. “Right now.”

I turned the beam back on and aimed it at the journal. Before we left, I had to know whether David had concealed anything else inside it. I thumbed through the thick leather book toward the end, checking for papers tucked into seams or attached to the cover.

The final third held empty pages. Then, on the last page with writing, I found one final entry.

The script stopped me. It did not look like the frantic handwriting from the entries David had written while hiding and afraid. Each letter was calm, evenly formed, and deliberate, as if he had forced himself to record the truth with absolute care.

I believed Greg was running everything, David had written. I assumed he directed the offshore accounts and the fraud. But Greg lacked the discipline to create a clean multimillion-dollar operation. He was reckless, impulsive, and far too careless to keep an international scheme hidden.

Confusion tightened across my forehead as I continued. Then every word drained the warmth from my blood. David had broken into encrypted messages on the shell company’s private server the night before. Greg had not been blackmailing anyone or negotiating with chemical plants. He had only been the violence behind the operation. The shell corporation’s CEO had designed the fraud, approved the toxic dumping, and forged David’s name on the permits. Laura—not Greg—was the real criminal mastermind.