Page 10 of Brutal
Respectable on paper.
Destructive everywhere else.
Fifteen years ago, a man digging into the Vexley Group died.
Officially, it was an accident.
I never believed that.
I reach the subway entrance and tighten my grip on my bag. Damn these high heels!
I descend and wait for the train.
I’ve been following whispers for months now. A retired accountant who drank too much at lunch and said Arthur Vexley got rid of the wrong man once. A former assistant who wouldn’t tell me anything useful but went pale at the sound of the Vexley name. All threads, but enough to make me ask questions.
That’s why I went to the club tonight.
I needed to see one of Arthur’s sons with my own eyes. Not in a photograph, not in an article written by someone too scared or too paid off to say what mattered.
Now I have.
And I hate that my clearest memory of him is not the danger, but the heat.
The subway stops, and I get in. It’s a short ride, and I get out and walk the half a block to my apartment. My place is small, plain, and mine. A lamp by the window. Books stacked on the floor because I keep meaning to buy another shelf and never do.
I kick off the uncomfortable heels at the door and cross straight to my desk.
This is the real reason I came back to the city. I switch the lamp on and look at the corkboard above my desk.
Articles on Vexley Group acquisitions. Corporate filings. Old photographs. Legal notes. Dates. Names. A timeline in black ink with question marks. Arthur Vexley in one picture, silver at the temples and smiling. Samson in another, caught outside a gala with one hand tucked in his coat pocket, jaw set like he’s waiting for something. Nathaniel in a courthouse photo, elegant and cold, every inch the son who makes filth sound lawful.
And then Cain.
My file on the youngest brother is thinner than it should be. That bothered me the first time I realized it, and it bothers me more tonight.
Samson is easy to trace. He appears in security-adjacent records, incident reports, photographs taken at openings and charity functions where his size alone does half the talking. Nathaniel is easier still. Legal documentation. Interviews. Panel appearances. Foundation boards. He uses visibility to his advantage.
But Cain Vexley appears in some photographs and almost nowhere else.
No obvious board seat. No consistent operational title. No legal trail.
I sit down at my desk and pull out an old folder.
The paper inside is soft from handling. Copies of reports. Archived articles. I open to the same pages I always do, though I already know every line by heart.
A confrontation. A death. A conclusion delivered too cleanly.
Accident.
I stare at the word until it means nothing.
The timing is what always bothers me most. It makes no sense, and the more I think about it, the less sense it makes. The confrontation happened in a place only a handful of people should have known about. Yet the Vexleys were there.
I close the folder and lean back.
Maybe Samson knows nothing useful. Maybe he’s just muscle in an expensive suit. But that’s not what I saw tonight. He listened too carefully. Held himself too tightly. He didn’t have the look of a man who simply obeys.
No.
