All Chapters of The Vision She Hid: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Midnight found me curled in the glow of my laptop, barefoot, blanketed in silence, with one hand on the mouse and the other wrapped around a mug of coffee. The room smelled of stale cigarettes, late nights, and something faintly medicinal—the ghost of the infirmary still clinging to my clothes like a bad dream. I hit play again.The footage jittered back to life like it hated being forgotten. A shipment yard glowed in the dark—grainy, floodlit, silent. The hijack played out like a clockwork: fast, brutal, executed with surgical precision. Crates were loaded in a Polish truck, they went missing in front of my eyes like they’d never wanted to be there in the first place. I couldn’t see the face of the man who spilled something from the large metal canister. The face was concealed with simple surgical mask and a hoodie. Fire rolled through Elky’s yard like it was purifying sin with gasoline. I spotted nothing new there. I’ve seen that footage at least ten times before. Everybody else ha

The next morning I found a tape on my breakfast table. There was a husty note that came with it. “Check this. Good luck. Elky”. I didn’t know whether to be touched or to expect a wild trick. I didn’t feel like having breakfast anymore. I grabbed the tape and rushed upstairs and locked the door behind me. I pulled the blackout curtains together. My bedroom was now dark, except for the blue glow of the computer screen—the kind of glow that doesn’t light a space so much as bruise it. I sat cross-legged on the edge of my bed like I was perched on a crime scene, which wasn’t far off from the truth. My hair was tied back, my eyes weren’t blinking, and Elky’s video had been playing on loop for the better part of an hour.It was dock footage from a few years ago. Grainy enough to qualify as antique. The camera must’ve been older than sin and dumber than a bag of hammers, because it picked up shadows instead of faces. Still, it caught something. Or maybe I just wanted it to.I dragged the slid

I didn’t need the table lamp. The blue light of the screen lit the room like just enough for what I was going to look at. Fitting, considering I was about to unzip the last testament of a man who’d been more a ghost than a father for the past ten years. The cursor blinked like it was daring me to dig in.The file was encrypted, naturally. Probably his idea. I tried the usual suspects—birthdays, Greek gods, the name of the horse he never let me ride. No luck. Then I typed truthhurts, and the thing rolled over like a guilty conscience. Typical. He always had a bizarre taste for irony.My father’s will loaded slow, line by line, with all the charm of a medical bill and none of the anesthesia. It was written in Courier font, used a lot of legal phrasing, and sounded ice-pick cold. I scrolled past the preliminary fluff—estate items, shares, safety deposit boxes in. I eventually found what I was looking for:Formula X37: intellectual property and revenue rights to be divided equally between

My cheeks flushed. It was about time to find out who that “private source”was. Not much I could do about it cuddling the old trunk in a dusty study. This was a job for jittery Dutsy, and I hoped he only looked jittery and was made out of more solid stuff inside when I was sending him a text message using Felix’s secret phone. I was looking at Celeste on a horse flying over the neat hedge from across her desk when Felix’s phone vibrated. It was Dutsy, he decided using text message was not safe. That said something to me already. I heard Dutsy’s cool, supercilious voice that sounded as if it thought it was pretty cool. It said snobbishly, after I had answered: “Who do you think you are, a private detective?” “Check,” I said. “Right. You are a fool thinking that. You have been recommended to me as someone who can be trusted to keep her mouth shut. I started to doubt the validity of this recommendation lately. It didn’t do old Felix any good working for you, did it? Now, listen ca

Marta’s story was the story of a dirty world populated with dirty, nasty people down to top. It was not new, not surprising, not even sad. But there was something else I needed figuring. There was one thing that bothered me about all that. It had a name written on it, and it was called Elky big bloody Jennings. There was no point sitting in my room waiting for answers to knock at my door. So I watched a few violent fights on you tube that gave me a bit of inspiration and a mild confidence too. My muscles were that of a ballet dancer, and `I felt happy enough to stretch my leg all the way up to perform a free nose job on some lousy bastard getting on my way. Midnight visits the west wing like a professional burglar—quiet, confident, with nothing to complaint to police about. The hallway felt colder here, the air tasted stuffy and bitter, and every locked door looked like a challenge. I slipped my hairpin into the lock of a door that, on the surface, was Elky’s “man caves”—leather chair