Chapter 24
title: "The Catskills Trap" wordCount: 2376
The cabin smells like Richard's cologne and burnt coffee, and I know before I see him that we've walked into exactly what he wanted.
Daniel's hand tightens on my wrist. "We should leave."
"Too late for that." The voice comes from the back room, smooth and familiar from the video footage we'd watched a dozen times. Richard Park steps into the dim light of the main room, and he looks nothing like the polished executive from the recordings. His hair is longer, streaked with gray. His face is gaunt, cheekbones sharp enough to cut. But his eyes—those are the same. Calculating. Triumphant.
"You made good time," Richard says. "I expected you around dawn."
My nails dig into my palms. "You wanted us to find you."
"Of course I did." He gestures to the wall behind him, covered in photos and documents. Daniel's face appears in at least twenty of them. Mine in a dozen more. "I've been waiting for James to make his move. The contract was perfect—so perfectly him. Exploit the thing Daniel loves most to get what he wants."
"How did you—"
"Know about the contract?" Richard's smile doesn't reach his eyes. "I have eyes everywhere, Nora. How do you think I've stayed ahead of James for three years?"
Daniel moves in front of me, a subtle shift that puts his body between Richard and me. "What do you want?"
"To give you what you need." Richard crosses to a desk in the corner, pulls out a manila folder. "James has been very talkative lately. Confessing to old friends, making threats, arranging payments. I have recordings of everything—the offshore accounts, the murder he ordered in 2019, the blackmail. Enough to put him away for twenty years."
The folder lands on the table between us with a soft thud.
"Why would you give us that?" I ask.
"Because I don't want CoreStone." Richard's laugh is bitter. "I never wanted it. I wanted James to destroy himself trying to keep it, and he's almost there. But I need one thing from you first, Daniel."
"Let me guess." Daniel's voice is flat. "Sign the company over to you."
"Not to me. To a neutral trustee who will manage it until the legal proceedings are complete." Richard pulls out another document, this one crisp and new. "Once James is in prison, the trustee will transfer control to you. Clean. Legal. No strings."
I step around Daniel. "Who's the trustee?"
"A corporate entity I've established. Completely separate from—"
"A shell company you control." The words taste like ash. "You're asking him to trade one prison for another."
Richard's expression doesn't change. "I'm offering him a way out. James's contract expires in forty-six hours. Your immigration deadline is in sixty-nine. This solves both problems."
"How does this solve my problem?" I ask.
"The trustee has connections. Real ones, not James's empty promises." Richard's gaze shifts to me, and something in it makes my skin crawl. "Your visa situation can be resolved in forty-eight hours. I've already made the calls."
Daniel's hand finds mine. "We need to discuss this."
"Of course." Richard gestures to the back room. "Take your time. I'll make coffee."
The back room is smaller, cramped with a cot and a desk covered in more papers. Daniel closes the door, and the silence between us is suffocating.
"It's another trap," I say.
"I know."
"Then why are we even considering—"
"Because we're out of options." Daniel runs his hand through his hair, and I notice how exhausted he looks. The drive took four hours, and neither of us slept. "Sixty-nine hours, Nora. That's all we have."
"So we just trust him? The man who faked his death and has been stalking us for months?"
"No." Daniel's voice drops. "But we can use him. Take the recordings, expose James, and deal with Richard after."
"He won't just give us the recordings."
"I know."
I move to the desk, needing something to do with my hands. The papers are financial documents, property records, surveillance photos. And then I see it—a folder labeled in neat handwriting: Nora's Notebook—Sponsorship Pipeline.
My hands shake as I open it.
The first page is a spreadsheet. Dates, company names, amounts. $5,000 to Kerrygold for the butter campaign. $8,000 to Lodge for the cast iron feature. $12,000 to Bob's Red Mill. The list goes on, page after page, totaling over $50,000.
Every sponsorship I've celebrated. Every milestone I thought I'd earned.
All paid for by Daniel.
"Nora." His voice behind me is careful. Too careful.
I turn, the folder clutched in my hands. "What is this?"
He looks at the papers, and his face goes pale. "Let me explain."
"Explain what? That you've been buying my success?" My voice cracks. "That every sponsor, every opportunity, every—"
"It wasn't like that."
"Then what was it like, Daniel?" I throw the folder at him. Papers scatter across the floor. "Tell me. Use your words."
He's silent. That terrible silence he does when he's cornered, when he can't find a way to make it sound better than it is.
"How long?" I ask.
"Six months."
Six months. Half a year of lies. I think of every excited call I made to Priya, every post celebrating a new partnership, every moment I felt like I was finally building something real.
"Did any of them actually want to work with me?"
"Yes." He steps forward. "Nora, they all loved your content. I just—I made sure they saw it. Made sure they had the budget to—"
"To pity-sponsor the poor immigrant girl?" The jade bracelet on my wrist catches the light, and I think of my grandmother, who built her restaurant from nothing. Who never took a dollar she didn't earn. "You made me a charity case."
"That's not what I did."
"Then what do you call it?"
"I call it making sure the world saw what I saw." His voice rises, finally breaking through that careful control. "You're brilliant, Nora. Your recipes, your writing, your—everything. But the industry is rigged. You needed someone to open the doors, and I had the keys."
"I needed to open them myself." My throat is tight. "I needed to know I could do it. That I was good enough."
"You are good enough."
"How would I know?" The question hangs between us. "How would I ever know now?"
A knock on the door. Richard's voice, amused: "Everything okay in there?"
Daniel doesn't look away from me. "We need to focus on the immediate problem."
"This is the immediate problem." I gesture between us. "You've been lying to me for six months. Manipulating my career, my confidence, my—"
"I was trying to help."
"I didn't ask for your help." The words come out sharper than I intend. "I asked you to believe in me. There's a difference."
His jaw tightens. "I do believe in you."
"No, you believe in your version of me. The one you've been carefully constructing with your money and your connections and your—" I stop, because my voice is shaking and I refuse to cry in front of Richard. "Let's just—we need to deal with him first."
"Nora."
"Later." I push past him, back into the main room where Richard is pouring coffee into three mugs. The domesticity of it is obscene.
Richard hands me a mug. I don't drink.
"Productive conversation?" he asks.
"What else do you have on us?" I set the mug down hard enough that coffee sloshes over the rim. "What other secrets are you sitting on?"
"Quite a few, actually." Richard settles into a chair, completely at ease. "But I'm not interested in blackmail. I'm interested in justice."
"Justice." Daniel's voice is cold. "Is that what you call this?"
"I call it giving you a choice James never gave me." Richard's mask slips for just a moment, and I see something raw underneath. "He destroyed my life, Daniel. Turned the board against me, froze my accounts, made sure I couldn't show my face without being arrested for crimes I didn't commit. So yes, I disappeared. I made him think he'd won. And I've spent three years documenting every illegal thing he's done since."
"Why now?" I ask. "Why wait until—"
"Until he went after you?" Richard's gaze shifts to me. "Because that's when I knew he was desperate enough to make mistakes. The contract he offered Daniel was sloppy. Traceable. He's losing control, and desperate men are predictable."
Daniel moves to the wall of photos. "You've been following us for months."
"I've been protecting you." Richard stands, joins him at the wall. "James has had people watching you since the engagement announcement. I've been watching them. Making sure they didn't get too close."
"The figure outside the diner," I say. "That was you."
"That was one of James's people. I was the one who made sure he didn't follow you home." Richard taps a photo of Daniel and me at the farmer's market. "You have no idea how many times I've kept you safe."
The words make my skin crawl. "We didn't ask you to."
"No, but Daniel's my nephew. Family protects family, even when—" He stops, and for the first time, his composure cracks. "Even when family has failed you."
Daniel's hand is on the wall, fingers spread over a photo of James. "What's your real endgame?"
"I told you. James in prison, CoreStone in neutral hands until—"
"Bullshit." Daniel turns, and his voice is sharp enough to cut. "You don't spend three years planning revenge just to hand the company to me. What do you really want?"
Richard is quiet for a long moment. Then he smiles, and it's the saddest thing I've ever seen.
"I want my brother to know what it feels like to lose everything." He pulls out his phone, pulls up a video file. "I want him to sit in a cell and think about every choice that brought him there. I want him to understand that power built on cruelty always collapses."
He presses play. James's voice fills the room, tinny through the phone speaker: "—don't care how you do it, just make sure the audit trail disappears. If the SEC finds those accounts, we're all going to prison."
Another voice, unfamiliar: "What about the Chen situation?"
"Handle it. Quietly. If she gets deported, Daniel will fall in line."
My blood goes cold.
Daniel's face is white. "When was this recorded?"
"Two days ago." Richard stops the video. "He's been planning to sabotage your visa application, Nora. Make sure it gets denied so he can swoop in with his 'solution' and force Daniel's hand."
The room tilts. I grab the edge of the table.
"That's why the deadline moved up," I say. "That's why my lawyer suddenly couldn't reach anyone at USCIS."
"James has friends in the immigration office." Richard's voice is gentle, which somehow makes it worse. "He's been pulling strings for weeks."
Daniel's fist slams into the wall. The photos shake. "I'm going to kill him."
"No, you're going to be smart." Richard crosses to him, puts a hand on his shoulder. "You're going to sign this document, let me handle James, and save the woman you love. That's what you're going to do."
"And then what?" I ask. "We just trust that you'll hand CoreStone back? That you won't use it the same way James did?"
"You don't have to trust me." Richard pulls out another folder, this one thicker. "You just have to trust that I want James to suffer more than I want the company. And I do. God help me, I do."
The folder lands on the table next to the first one. Inside are more recordings, more documents, more evidence of James's crimes. It's overwhelming. Damning. Exactly what we need.
And exactly what Richard wants us to think.
"How long do we have to decide?" Daniel asks.
"The contract expires when James's does. Forty-six hours." Richard checks his watch. "But I'd recommend deciding sooner. James isn't patient, and he's not above—"
His phone buzzes. He glances at the screen, and his expression shifts. Not quite a smile. Something sharper.
"Speak of the devil," he says.
"What?" I move closer, trying to see the screen.
Richard turns the phone toward us. A text from an unknown number: I know where you are. I'm coming to finish this. - J
"How did he—" Daniel starts.
"I told you. He has people everywhere." Richard pockets the phone. "We have about ten minutes before he arrives. I suggest you make a decision."
My heart is hammering. "He's armed?"
"James? Always." Richard moves to a closet, pulls out a duffel bag. "But so am I. This is my property, and he's trespassing. Self-defense is a beautiful thing."
"You planned this." she understoods me like ice water. "You wanted him to come here."
"I wanted him to make one more mistake." Richard unzips the bag, and I see the glint of metal inside. "And he just did. Breaking and entering, threatening witnesses, possibly assault with a deadly weapon—it's all on camera."
He gestures to the corners of the room, and I see them now. Tiny cameras, hidden in the rafters.
"You're insane," I say.
"I'm thorough." Richard pulls out a gun, checks the chamber. "Now, are you going to sign the document, or are you going to let James walk in here and take everything?"
Daniel looks at me. I look at the folders on the table, at the evidence that could save us or damn us, at Richard with his gun and his cameras and his three years of carefully constructed revenge.
And I think about the sponsorship documents upstairs. About six months of lies. About how I don't know what's real anymore.
"I need to know something first," I say to Daniel. My voice is steadier than I feel. "What else have you been paying for? The apartment? The equipment? The—"
"Nora, this isn't the time—"
"What else?" I'm shaking now, the jade bracelet cold against my wrist. "Was any of it real?"
He opens his mouth. Closes it. That terrible silence again.
And then Richard's phone buzzes. He glances at it, and his smile widens.
"James is ten minutes out," he says. "He's armed."