How to Tame a Silver Fox – Episode 25
The hidden door sealed out the noise of the fundraiser. Cole dragged Harper down a narrow stairway lined with shelves of archived records, keeping one hand locked around her wrist.
“Let go of me,” Harper said. She forced herself to stay calm, remembering how she had escaped Bryan’s grip.
Cole released her only after they reached a basement office. “You came for evidence. I’m giving it to you.”
He placed an old file on the desk. Inside were photographs of the Boston warehouse, payment records bearing Mark’s signature, and a copy of Evan’s statement dated after the fire.
“Your father made a deal with Victor Sloane,” Cole said. “Evan lived long enough to expose him, so Mark paid him to disappear.”
Harper examined the documents rather than accepting Cole’s version. Several signatures looked real, but the pages had been assembled to tell one carefully chosen story.
“If Evan survived, where is he now?” she asked.
Pain crossed Cole’s face. “He disappeared again after he sent me the first file. I thought Chris had found him.”
“So you burned my house?”
Cole’s surprise looked genuine. “I opened the window and left the diary message. I never started that fire.”
Above them, Chris forced the portrait door open after tracking Harper’s emergency signal. He descended with two security officers, but stopped when he heard Cole’s denial.
Harper saw him and made a small gesture asking him to wait. He obeyed, though every line of his body demanded action.
“Who locked us inside?” she asked Cole. “Who knew you would lure me upstairs?”
Cole looked toward the payment records. “The same person who told me Chris left my father to die. I received the message from an account connected to Sloane.”
Harper picked up Evan’s statement. A handwritten notation appeared beneath the official text, too faint to notice at first: *M.R. was never told. C.C. must believe I’m dead.*
Chris entered the office and read the line over her shoulder. The initials suggested Mark had not ordered Evan’s disappearance—and that Evan himself had chosen to deceive Chris.
A slow clap sounded from the stairway. Christina stood above them with a gun held in both hands, terror and determination fighting across her face.
“My father says that file belongs to him,” she said. Behind her, the hidden door closed, and Harper finally understood that Christina Fawkes had never been the most dangerous member of her family.
