Chapter 223: A Shrine to Natalie
Chapter 223: A Shrine to Natalie
Flashback continued.
Crane lay sprawled naked across the hotel room bed, looking thoroughly pleased with himself.
He was currently keeping two very young, strikingly beautiful women quite busy. One of them was enthusiastically giving him a blowjob, while the other sat directly on his face, moaning loudly as he licked her.
The room was filled with a chorus of deep grunts, wet sounds, and sighs of pleasure.
But before long, Crane’s eyelids began to droop. Within seconds, his movements slowed down to a sluggish crawl, and he found he could no longer pleasure the girl sitting on his face.
His head rolled to the side, and his mouth fell open as he drifted into a drug-induced sleep. The wine the women had kept refilling for him all evening had finally done its work.
The girl straddling his face slowly slid off and looked across at the other one. They exchanged a single nod.
Quietly, one of them opened the bedside drawer where Crane’s phone had been tucked away. She lifted it out, leaned over him, and gently prised one of his eyelids open, holding the phone up to his face until it recognised him and unlocked.
The second girl pulled out her own phone, read off a string of characters, and carefully typed the code into Crane’s device.
After successfully inputting the code, they quickly wiped the device down, placed it exactly back into the drawer, and typed a quick text message to an unknown number.
The message read: Done. But we can’t find the burner phone anywhere in this room.
***
Back in the Dravengard estate, Kai sat in his car, parked only a few feet from Crane’s residence.
His eyes were glued to his laptop screen, his fingers flying across the keyboard, working his way methodically through Crane’s private security system, disabling one camera after another until the whole residence went dark and blind.
A notification pinged.
Connor, standing just outside with Derek at his shoulder, glanced down at his phone and read the message from the women. He held it up so the King could see.
Derek read it, his jaw tightening.
If he isn’t with the burner phone at the hotel," he said through the mind-link, "then it should be hidden right here in his home.
He and Connor slipped into Crane’s residence, silent as shadows.
Search thoroughlyin his bedroom, Derek linked. I’ll search the study and the library.
But before they parted ways, Derek caught Connor’s arm.
Be careful, he warned. A man like my uncle doesn’t simply hide things. He sets traps. Little markers, things positioned just so he’ll know the instant anyone has tampered with his belongings. Move slowly. Put everything back exactly as you found it.
Connor nodded, and they split apart.
They searched with painstaking care. Under the desk. Inside every drawer. Beneath the beds. Behind the paintings and portraits hung along the walls. Derek ran his hands along the underside of shelves, checked the spines of books, felt for false bottoms.
But there was no burner phone.
Frustrated, Derek turned around and started to leave the room. But just as his hand touched the doorknob, a strange thought suddenly occurred to him.
He stopped and looked back, his eyes sweeping the room once more, and they landed on the chair behind Crane’s desk.
It was strange for a standard office desk chair. He had not properly registered it before.
The chair was an antique, ornate, beautifully carved old thing, and it was the only antique item in the entire room. Everything else was modern, sleek and functional. But this one chair was old, and deliberately so.
Crane was not a kind of man who cared about historical furniture unless it served a purpose.
That can’t mean nothing, he thought.
Derek walked back across the room, his curiosity piqued. He had actually overturned the chair earlier during his initial search, and found nothing.
But now he moved around it slowly, deliberately, examining the intricate woodwork along the headrest, the arms, the joints, inch by inch.
Soon enough, his eyes caught a tiny, almost invisible design carved into the back of the antique wood.
It was shaped like a miniature key resting inside a lock. The carving was so perfectly blended into the natural grain of the dark wood that an unsuspecting person could look at it a hundred times and still completely miss it.
Derek pressed a fingertip to it, found the catch hidden within, and turned.
Slowly, with a soft mechanical sound, a compartment slid out from beneath the seat of the chair, a hidden drawer so seamlessly built into the frame that no one could ever have guessed it was there.
And inside it lay the burner phone.
Found it, Derek linked to Connor. The bastard hid it in his chair.
He reached in and lifted the phone out. But his eyes caught on something else tucked into the compartment beneath it. A stack of documents. His curiosity sharpened.
What could Crane possibly be hiding so carefully, locked away in a secret drawer?
He pulled them out and turned them over, but was baffled to see no writing, bank details, or text on them at all.
But beneath them lay photographs. Dozens of them.
Derek picked them up, and his heart dropped straight through the floor.
His mother.
Every single photograph was of his mother, Natalie. Taken at different times, across different years. Different places.
Some of them candid, snatched from a distance. Some of them disturbingly close. And some of them intimate, the kind of images no one should ever have had of her.
"What the fuck..." Derek breathed, his hands going cold as he shuffled through them, image after image after image.
Connor’s voice cut into his mind.
Your Grace. You need to come to your uncle’s bedroom right now. You need to see this.
In no time, Derek stood in the doorway of Crane’s bedroom.
Connor had opened the wardrobe. And inside it, set into the back wall, hidden behind the hanging clothes, was a second concealed section.
A shrine.
A shrine to Natalie.
At its centre stood a semi-realistic, custom-made mannequin that looked exactly like Derek’s late mother, right down to the facial structure and the color of her eyes.
It wore red lingerie and a blonde wig styled exactly the way Natalie had worn her hair. And all around it, arranged with obsessive care, hung dresses of every length and colour, an entire wardrobe built for a dead woman.
Derek stared at it, his stomach turning, his mind refusing to make sense of what he was seeing.
"Is this sick bastard obsessed with my late mother, or what?" he said slowly, his voice low and disbelieving.