Chapter 56 - Fractured Trust
Before I could plan my move for the Navy Yard, I needed answers that were buried deeper than public records. There was only one living person who had spent forty years inside Marcus Harrington’s inner sanctum, absorbing his paranoia and his secret filings.
Jason.
An hour later, I sat across from my older brother in the visiting booth of the medium-security correctional facility outside Concord. Stripped of his tailored suits and platinum watch, Jason looked gaunt, his arrogance eroded by months behind gray walls.
He picked up the receiver and gave a bitter, mocking smirk. "Well, well. The family savior comes down from his mountain. Did you come to gloat, little brother? Come to tell me how wonderful life is playing king in the ashes I left behind?"
"Shut up, Jason," I said, my voice ice-cold. "I don't have time for your pathetic routine. Look at this."
I pressed a color photograph of the gold pocket watch against the scratch-resistant glass partition.
Jason’s smirk vanished instantly. His pupils dilated, and he physically recoiled into his plastic chair, his skin turning an ashen gray. "Where... where did you get that?"
"It was thrown onto my porch last night by Julian Castille," I said. "You know what it is, don't you?"
Jason began to laugh, but it was a breathless, hysterical sound that lacked any humor. "You idiot. You stupid, self-righteous idiot. You thought you were so brilliant dismantling Harrington Industries. You thought you were cleansing the family name!"
"Explain it, Jason. Now."
"Marcus kept that watch locked in the floor safe of his private master bedroom for thirty years!" Jason hissed, leaning forward, his fingers clawing against the glass. "He warned me once, when I was twenty-one. He told me that Harrington Industries was built on an invisible foundation of quicksand. He said if the balance was ever disrupted, the *Serpent* would come from France to skin us alive!"
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"Did he pay them?" I pressed. "Did Marcus satisfy the principal?"
"No!" Jason whispered frantically. "He double-crossed them! In 1992, he stole their bearer certificates out of a shared deposit box in Zurich and used them to buy the Vance distribution lines. Marcus didn't pay the debt—he buried the proof that the Castille syndicate ever owned a share of the fleet! If Julian has that watch, he doesn't just want money, Brian. He wants vengeance for thirty years of humiliation. And he’s going to erase everyone who carries Marcus’s blood!"
