The Loan Shark Threatened My Brother, but After My Answer Everything Suddenly Fell Silent in the Office and He Lost Color

That night, when I was threatened with my brother’s murder, the most dangerous man stood over me and listened to my silent crying.

The Marchetti house never slept. It only pretended to sleep. At two in the morning, the stone mansion rising above the Atlantic resembled a tomb: darkened windows, closed shutters, and one narrow light left on in the small security room. There, the guards played cards silently and listened to the rain outside.

I had been a ghost in that house for eight months. A gray uniform, a wheeled cart, and eyes that remained fixed on the floor. On my left wrist hung a small lighthouse-shaped red pendant—Colin had given it to me at the hospital and told me that as long as it shone, we would endure too. Every time fear seized me, I touched its jagged edges with my fingers.

I learned the rules quickly. You did not ask about the bullet marks that had appeared in the wall in the east wing. You did not look night visitors in the eyes. And you did not make noise at Mr. Marchetti’s door.

That was exactly the rule I broke at one forty in the morning.

I was cleaning the brass lamps. The chemical bleach had cracked my palms, but I needed the job. The salary in this house was three times higher than usual, because they paid not for wiping away dust, but for silence.

My brother Colin was dying.

Leukemia had not responded even to the first courses of chemotherapy. The doctors found a new medicine, but the insurance company did not cover it. Six months earlier, I was sitting in a hospital corridor when Colin coughed up blood and still smiled at me.

“Don’t cry, Nadia,” he told me. “I’m still ugly, and that’s good.”

That was when I turned to Seamus Doyle. He gave me sixty thousand in cash and explained the interest in a calm voice, as if he were reading me a menu. The medicine gave Colin six months. The debt, however, grew every day.

The next night, the telephone rang.

An unknown number appeared on the screen. My heart immediately began racing. The hospital did not call at night with good news, and Doyle called me only when the debt was breaking down my door.

“Nadia, darling,” Seamus’s voice said.

“I’ll have the money on Friday. I swear. On Friday.”

“Friday is too far away. I need twenty thousand today.”

“I don’t have that much.”

“I know.”

I heard the small striking sound of a lighter, then his inhalation.

“I’m standing in the parking lot of Saint Catherine’s Hospital now,” he said. “Ronan is already on the third floor of oncology. By your brother’s room.”

My knees gave way.

“Don’t touch him.”

“You have one hour. If you don’t transfer the money, Ronan will put air into Ronan’s transfusion. It will look like an accident.”

“Seamus, please!”

“Twenty thousand, Nadia. Otherwise your brother won’t wake up in the morning.”

The sound of footsteps inside the office stopped.

I did not notice when Mr. Marchetti crossed the room or when he turned the heavy handle. The door opened, and the golden light of his office spilled across the carpet.

I held the telephone and cried silently. Only then did I realize that the most dangerous man was standing over me.

His shadow reached me.

“Repeat that,” he said.

I could not raise my head.

On the other side, Doyle was breathing.

Marchetti’s hand slowly reached toward my telephone, and I realized that now one wrong movement would destroy both brothers…

Marchetti’s fingers stopped a few centimeters from the telephone.

I was still listening to Doyle’s quiet breathing. My left hand gripped the iron handle of the cart so tightly that the red lighthouse pendant hung from my wrist and pierced my skin.

“Tell him you’ll find the money,” Marchetti said quietly.

There was no anger in his voice. That was worse. The voice resembled a closed door, behind which the decision had already been made.

“Nadia?” Doyle laughed. “Are you still there? Maybe you should ask your boss. Men like Marchetti love helping little people when the cameras are on.”

For the first time, I saw Marchetti’s eyes up close. Tired, darkened, and so cold, as if he weighed every word.

“Tell him he’ll receive the money in one hour,” he told me.

“What are you doing?” I barely managed to say.

“I’m buying time.”

“He will kill my brother.”

“If you hang up now, he may already have killed him. Talk.”

I brought the telephone to my ear.

“I’ll bring you the money,” I told Doyle. “Just don’t touch my brother.”

“Now that I like. Where will you bring it?”

Marchetti drew three short circles on the floor with his finger. I had to think of the answer, but in his eyes I saw such certainty, as though the whole city already had its places assigned.

“To the old warehouse at the port,” I said.

“You’ll come alone.”

“Yes.”

“If anyone follows you, Ronan will turn off the transfusion first.”

The call ended.

Only the faint hum of the lamp remained in the corridor. I stared at the telephone as if I could find my brother’s face on its screen.

“Why are you helping me?” I asked.

“I’m not helping you yet. First I found out who dared to order death at my house’s door.”

We entered the office. Three telephones, two loaded guns, and an open folder lay on the desk. The hands indicating seconds had been removed from the clock on the wall. Marchetti did not watch time; he forced time to work for him.

“Mr. Marchetti, I’m only a cleaner.”

“No. An ordinary cleaner doesn’t withstand Doyle for this long.”

He looked at my hands. Blood had come out through the cracks.

“Is this your debt?”

“My brother’s treatment.”

“How much is Doyle asking from you?”

“Twenty thousand.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

The door opened and Luca, Marchetti’s head of security, entered. He held a wet umbrella, and there was harbor mud on his coat sleeve.

“I checked the hospital,” he said. “Two cameras on the third floor are turned off. One of the security guards has been in the bathroom for the last twenty minutes, although he has not left the camera’s view.”

I sat down on a chair.

“Colin?”

“Alive,” Luca answered me. “But an unfamiliar man was wandering near his room.”

Marchetti picked up one of the telephones lying on the desk.

“Doyle is not merely collecting a debt,” he said. “In recent months, information about my shipments has been reaching his people. I knew someone inside was betraying me. I didn’t know how.”

“I have nothing to do with this.”

“I haven’t said that you do yet.”

His calm frightened me more than an accusation.

Luca placed a small memory card on the desk.

“We took this from his office. One file is encrypted. Its name is ‘Nadia.’”

My breath caught.

“I have nothing.”

“Maybe that is exactly why you have something,” Marchetti said.

He took my telephone and looked at the screen.

“The call was recorded.”

“What?”

“Automatic recording was turned on in your telephone.”

Doyle’s voice sounded again in the office: “Ronan will put air into the transfusion.”

I heard the sound of my own fear and my stomach contracted.

Marchetti listened to the recording to the end, then looked at Luca.

“Bring a lawyer in the morning.”

“And the police?”

“Not yet.”

He tapped the back of the telephone with his finger.

“If Doyle thinks this is only one debt, let’s allow him to talk a little more.”

At that same moment, the second telephone in the office rang. Luca answered, but after listening to a few words, his face changed.

“What happened?” I asked.

He looked at Marchetti.

“At the hospital, the doctor said Colin’s transfusion was changed. Someone signed a new prescription.”

Everything spun before my eyes.

Marchetti slowly put down the telephone and told me:

“Nadia, while we wait for Doyle, we need to know why he needed your brother dead…”

Luca inserted the memory card into the device, the first file appeared on the screen, and everyone’s face froze at the same time…

At first, only a white bar was visible on the screen. Then the file opened, and the room suddenly filled with unfamiliar voices.

It was footage from a warehouse camera. The time was visible in the corner of the screen: eleven forty-nine at night. Three men stood in Doyle’s office. One was Ronan. The second was Vito Bellani, Marchetti’s former head of security.

“The girl is already in debt,” Vito was saying. “But that won’t be enough.”

“Her brother is more useful,” Doyle answered. “If the boy dies, the woman will give up everything. The house, her salary, even her own life.”

The third man placed a folder on the table.

“Marchetti won’t find out?”

Doyle laughed.

“Marchetti sees only what we spill in blood before him.”

Luca clenched his teeth.

“He is my cousin,” he said. “Vito was head of security three years ago.”

Marchetti stared at the screen without a single muscle in his face moving.

“Turn it up louder,” he said.

Luca raised the volume.

“Colin’s case is not only intimidation,” Doyle continued. “We have our man in the hospital. We’ll forge the doctor’s signature too. The boy will die and everyone will think the illness took him.”

Pain began in my stomach. I gripped the edge of the chair with both hands.

“Why?” I asked. “Why my brother?”

Marchetti looked toward me.

“Because the doctor saw something in his case.”

“What did he see?”

Luca opened the second file. It contained a letter from the hospital doctor. A few weeks earlier, Colin had accidentally discovered that Doyle’s people were stealing money from the accounts of Marchetti’s shipments. Colin was a creator of financial programs, and he noticed the flow of money while voluntarily helping the charity’s accounts to be checked.

“He saw Doyle’s movement of money,” Marchetti said. “And he did not tell you, because he was protecting you.”

“Colin knew?”

“According to the recording, yes.”

Another audio recording began playing on the memory card. This time, Colin’s weak voice could be heard.

“If anything happens to me, tell Nadia that Doyle stole money from Marchetti’s company. Everything is on the small blue disk hidden under my bed.”

I stood up.

“Under the bed?”

“Luca, bring it immediately,” Marchetti said.

“My people at the hospital are already on the way.”

“No. I’m going myself.”

“It’s a trap,” I said.

Marchetti leaned toward me.

“That is exactly why I’m going.”

Four hours later, we were standing on the third floor of Saint Catherine’s Hospital. The sharp smell of disinfectant filled the corridor. Colin was alive, but his eyes were closed. Transparent liquid was slowly dripping through the tube of his transfusion.

“Nadia?” he said faintly.

“I’m here.”

“I knew you would come.”

“Don’t say anything.”

Marchetti stood on the other side of the bed.

“Where is the disk?”

Colin looked under the bed.

“Inside the wheel. A small plastic plug.”

Luca removed the plug. Inside, he found a small blue memory device.

Tables of accounts opened on the screen. Amounts, dates, fake companies, and signatures appeared one after another. The last file contained a conversation between Doyle and Vito in which they planned to kill Marchetti and take over his empire.

Marchetti listened to the recording. For the first time, I saw his face lose its color.

At that same moment, the telephone rang at the end of the corridor.

Luca answered and turned toward me a few seconds later.

“Doyle says that if you do not come alone to the old warehouse within one hour, the complete copy of Colin’s case will go to the press. He says he has another man in the hospital.”

“My brother is here,” I said.

“He took that into account too,” Luca answered.

Marchetti closed his hand around the memory device. Then his security heard knocking on the door.

A woman dressed in a white coat entered. She held a doctor’s folder in her hand.

“Patient Colin Haley’s condition has suddenly worsened,” she said.

I looked at her face.

A small metal badge hung around her neck, but her name was written differently on the folder.

Marchetti’s hand moved toward his gun.

But the woman smiled calmly and said:

“If you want the boy to remain alive, put all the telephones on the floor now…”

And at that very moment I realized that Doyle’s most dangerous move was still ahead…