Chapter 6 - The Truth That Survived
Ellis stopped Leo before he reached the door.
“Tell me exactly what you recognized.”
“My name,” Leo said. “She said my name.”
They played the message again.
Beneath Dante's voice, faint and muffled, a woman spoke two syllables.
Maybe Leo.
Maybe something else.
Fear had supplied certainty before evidence could catch up.
Audrey understood that now better than she wanted to.
“Could it be an old recording?” she asked.
Leo stared at her.
Then he sat down.
Ellis requested the original audio through the technical team and stepped into the corridor to make a call.
Vincent stayed beside his brother.
“Tell me about Nina.”
Leo rubbed his damaged hand.
“She worked nights. Sent money home. When she found me in the water, I couldn't remember my own address.”
He swallowed.
“Her brother died in that explosion.”
Vincent remembered the closed coffin.
The remains nobody had wanted him to see.
A watch substituted for certainty.
“Samuel Salazar,” Leo said. “Dante told everyone Samuel had skipped town. Nina never believed him.”
Six years of mourning had been built over another family's unanswered grief.
Vincent bent forward, elbows on his knees.
“We find out who was buried,” he said. “Properly. Whatever the answer costs.”
Leo nodded.
“I should have come home.”
“Yes.”
“I thought staying gone kept you safe.”
“It kept me grieving.”
Leo flinched.
Vincent did not take the words back.
Then he placed a hand on his brother's shoulder.
“But you came back. We can start there.”
Across the room, Audrey looked away, giving them the privacy the walls could not.
Ellis returned twenty minutes later.
“Nina Salazar is alive.”
Leo made a sound Vincent had never heard from him.
A broken laugh.
A breath catching halfway to a sob.
“She's been located through her sister,” Ellis continued. “She's safe. She says Dante recorded her during a confrontation years ago.”
The ship's horn proved nothing about his current location either.
It might have been another borrowed sound.
Dante had learned how to turn their guilt into a leash.
This time, nobody followed it.
Later, Audrey stepped outside the operations room into a small courtyard.
The rain had stopped.
Vincent found her beneath an awning, watching water drip from its edge.
“May I join you?”
She shifted enough to make room.
He stood beside her without touching her.
For a while, that was enough.
“I don't know who I am without all of it,” he admitted.
“The company?”
“The fear. The people who say yes before I finish speaking.”
Audrey looked at him.
“You could find out.”
“It might be someone you don't like.”
“It might be someone you don't like. That's the harder problem.”
He laughed once, quietly.
“You've been having this conversation with me for four years.”
“Mostly in my head. You were very difficult to interrupt.”
He turned toward her.
“I love you.”
The words arrived without strategy.
No demand followed them.
Audrey's eyes filled, though she kept her voice steady.
“You don't get an answer because we nearly died.”
“I know.”
“Or because you're finally telling the truth.”
“I know that, too.”
She looked down at his hand.
Then she reached for it.
“I have loved parts of you for a long time,” she said. “I need to see what you do with the rest.”
His fingers closed gently around hers.
“I can give you time.”
“You can give yourself time. I'm not a prize at the end of good behavior.”
He nodded.
She stepped closer.
“Ask me.”
He understood.
“May I kiss you?”
“Yes.”
The kiss was brief and soft, almost unbearably ordinary after everything that had happened.
When they separated, Audrey rested her forehead against his shoulder for one quiet breath.
Then Ellis opened the courtyard door.
“Dante contacted your attorney,” she said.
Vincent released Audrey's hand only when she let go.
“He wants a meeting. He says he has terms.”
Audrey straightened.
May you like
“Then he can explain them to people who keep records.”
This time, Vincent smiled. Before returning inside, he called his attorney and asked that every proposal go through counsel. No private bargains, no unrecorded promises. Audrey heard him say it without looking toward her for approval. That mattered more than another beautiful declaration.
