REVENGE, DIAPER and SNACKS - Chapter 76: Chapter 76

Dust, Secrets, and the Ride from Hell
We left town just before sunrise.
The kids were sleepy, stuffed full of bakery sugar and nap-fighting like tiny caffeine-powered gremlins. Mylene’s twins were chewing the last of the emergency gummy bears then fell asleep. Jhing Jhing’s waterproof foundation had been found (hallelujah), and she was lovingly wiping off what she called “battle sweat” in the passenger seat of her brand new silver van, which—by some miracle—still smelled like leather and not like muddy socks and trauma.
I was behind the wheel of our massive SUV, the front windshield speckled with bug guts, pine needles, and what may or may not have been sap mixed with mercenary blood. Mylene sat next to me, holding a lukewarm coffee and sighing every three minutes like she was narrating a drama about war widows.
“You know, this could be a Netflix show,” she muttered, gazing out the window.
“We’d be cancelled after two episodes,” I shot back. “Too many carbs. Not enough brooding men with axes.”
From the van’s open window, Jhing called out, “Speak for yourself! I brooded. I brooded and I accessorized!”
I rolled my eyes, shifting gears to climb the last hill before the highway. The ride was bumpy, loud, and so filled with overlapping conversations about booby traps, potato chips, and “who cried the most” that I could barely hear myself think.
But even in the chaos, I had one thing on my mind:
The Darrow Castle.
The place I was supposed to know.
The place I had never even been inside.
Digging Into the Past
“Joe,” I said into the speakerphone an hour into the drive. “Dig deeper. That castle Dorothy’s after? I know the name. I know the location. But that’s it. I grew up in a boarding school on the coast. Alec never let me near it, never spoke about it.”
“You think it’s more than a real estate inheritance?” Joe’s voice was crisp, no nonsense, and filled with the kind of exhaustion that only comes from interviewing armed criminals at four in the morning.
“I think Dorothy’s chasing something Alec never found. Something big. I want to know what she’s willing to start a war for.”
There was a pause.
“Alright,” Joe said. “I’ll reach out to my contacts. Historical records. Architectural archives. Anything I can find about the Darrow family and the vault she mentioned.”
“Secrets. Blood. That’s what she said.” I shifted lanes. “And vaults don’t build themselves.”
“Neither do vendettas,” Joe muttered. “I’ll be in touch.”
Arrival Back Home
We made it back home mid-morning. The sun was too bright, the air too clean, and somehow the sight of my peaceful front porch made the whole night feel like some sleep-deprived fever dream.
The kids scattered into the house like wild puppies—one already asking if they could “play mercenary” in the backyard. Cookie, Mylene’s poor half-traumatized lab mix, beelined for her favorite blanket and buried herself under it like a survivor of war.
Mylene started boiling noodles for the world’s messiest breakfast.
Jhing Jhing, her kids, Ivy and MJ went home and she put on a sheet mask and declared it “Post-Battle Skincare Sunday.”
And I finally sank into the kitchen chair and breathed.
Just once.
Then my phone rang.
Joe’s Call: The Truth About the Vault
I answered on the second ring.
Joe didn’t even bother with hello.
“Alec found something,” he said.
I straightened in my seat.
“Five years ago, Alec, um, he was digging—quietly—into Darrow Castle. Hired a private historian, even flew a guy from Scotland to cross-reference estate maps with regional records.”
“What was he looking for?” I asked.
“A treasure,” Joe said flatly. “Not metaphorical. Real. Tangible.”
I blinked. “A treasure. In our castle. Alec?”
“Yes. And according to what I’ve dug up, he found a map. A fragmented one. Hand-drawn. Old parchment. Likely left by one of your great-granduncles or someone equally insane. There’s a legend—family rumor, mostly—about valuables left behind by a Darrow ancestor fleeing a scandal.”
“Scandal?”
Joe sighed. “Bribery. Bank theft. The usual. But the story goes that he buried his loot in the estate walls before vanishing across the ocean. Alec spent years trying to find it. Never did.”
“And then he married Dorothy,” I finished for him.
“Yeah. And like the idiot he could be sometimes—bless his very conflicted soul—he told her.”
I closed my eyes. “So she thinks it’s hers.”
“She knows Alec never found it,” Joe added. “But she also knows you are the last legal Leon Darrow. She can’t claim it unless she proves you’re unfit or…not breathing. Or just a mother of three and that you are just crazy madness who pretended to be Leon.”
“Well, lucky for her,” I muttered. “I’m very alive and extremely annoying.”
Joe chuckled once. “She’s mobilizing. Fast. I’ll send you the scan of Alec’s notes. If anyone’s going to get there first—it needs to be you.”
Joe hadn’t said it outright—but I knew.
He was still thinking about it.
Still turning it over in his head like a riddle written in blood. Three weeks ago, I sat him down in his silent garage office, surrounded by broken drones, empty takeout containers, and shelves of outdated surveillance gear, and I told him the truth.
Not a theory. Not a joke.
A truth so ridiculous it shook him more than the ambush on Wren’s Hilltop.
“I’m not who you think I am,” I had said.
Joe scoffed then, cleaning his SIG Sauer with practiced calm. “What, like you’ve been a Russian spy this whole time?”
I leaned forward and whispered, “I’m Leon.”
That got his attention.
His hand froze mid-wipe. His head tilted slowly, like a dog that just heard a foreign language.
I didn’t wait for him to laugh.
“I’m Leon,” I said again. “My soul—my everything—got pulled into Catherine’s body. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. But it happened the moment she died.”
Joe blinked once. Twice.
And then he barked out a short laugh. “Jesus, you’re serious.”
“I am.”
“You realize how this sounds, right? Like a sci-fi paperback someone wrote in jail.”
“I know.”
But then I said something that wiped the humor from his face.
I told him Leon’s secret. The one no one knew but him and me.
“You remember that night in Alverton? 2009. When I disappeared for two days. You covered for me, told the captain I had the flu.”
Joe’s eyes sharpened. “Yeah. You said you were tracking the DeLuca shipment. And you swore I couldn’t tell anyone.”
“I wasn’t tracking drugs. I was blackmailing the deputy governor.”
Joe froze.
I continued, “He had a file. On your sister. A sealed one. He was threatening to leak it if you didn’t back off the housing deal. So I took care of it. I stole the file. Burned it. Told him if he touched you again, I’d bury him under his own pool.”
Silence.
Pure, reverent silence.
Joe swallowed hard.
“That file… No one knew about that but me and Leon.”
“I am Leon.”
That moment had changed everything between us. Joe never questioned me again—not out loud. But sometimes I caught him looking at me differently, as if still reconciling the soldier he’d followed into war with the woman cooking pancakes and yelling at kids to stop sword-fighting with breadsticks.
Back in the present, the house buzzed with the usual chaos. Cookie barked every time someone walked by the window. Jhing Jhing had hijacked the living room with a folding table, laying out three costume changes in case “a Netflix producer magically walked in.”
Mylene was texting the CSI boys again—she called them “Irish Liam and Discount Ryan Reynolds”—while comparing criminal profiles to villain arcs in Bridgerton.
And me? I stared at the copy of Alec’s map Joe had sent, fingers tracing the faded ink like it could speak.
That wall in the North Hall. That vault.
It was calling.