Chapter 1
The heater in Mave’s decade-old sedan had been dead for three winters. But tonight, the cold biting through her damp coat was the least of her problems.
Rain hammered the roof in relentless, punishing sheets. She sat parked under a flickering street lamp, staring at the crumpled eviction notice in her lap. It wasn’t just the eviction. It was the empty lock box she had found under her bed two hours ago.
Eight thousand dollars.
Three years of double shifts, bruised arches, and skipped meals. Saved meticulously, obsessively, for her younger sister Chloe’s residential care facility. Gone. Along with Ben.
Her hand shook violently as she smoothed out a discarded utility bill she had found near the trash can in his abruptly emptied closet. He had scribbled a phone number in blue ink along the margin. A new number. A clean slate for him, bought with her sister’s lifeline.
Mave’s vision blurred. The dam broke.
She had spent her entire twenty-four years swallowing her pride, keeping her head down, surviving in a city that chewed up the weak. But this was the final blow. It broke something fundamental inside her.
She grabbed her phone. The cracked screen splintered the harsh backlight into spiderwebs. She dialed the number. Her thumb slipped on the glass, striking a seven instead of a one.
She didn’t notice. She didn’t care.
She pressed the call button and pressed the phone to her ear, sucking in jagged, tear-choked breaths.
It rang once. Twice.
Click.
Across the city, in the soundproofed, reinforced office of a meatpacking plant that smelled faintly of ammonia and strongly of cigar smoke, Gideon Ward held a burner phone to his ear.
This specific phone was a black plastic brick. It only received calls from three people. Two of them were currently sitting across from his desk, waiting for orders regarding a missing shipment of stolen European pharmaceuticals. The third was dead.
So when it rang, the room went instantly silent.
Gideon raised a hand. His men stopped breathing. He answered, expecting the voice of a rival, a blackmailer, or a ghost.
Instead, he heard a woman weeping.
It wasn’t a delicate, cinematic cry. It was an ugly, desperate sound. The sound of an animal caught in a snare, exhausting its last ounce of strength before the predator arrived.
Gideon didn’t speak. He sat back in his heavy leather chair, his dark eyes narrowing. He was thirty-two, built like a heavyweight boxer, and possessed a mind that calculated human lives in terms of leverage and liability. In his world, people begged, they bargained, they screamed — but they always did it with an agenda.
This woman had no agenda. She was simply falling apart.
“You took it,” Mave choked out, her voice raw, grating against the cheap microphone of her phone. “You took everything.”
Gideon remained silent. Across the desk, his lieutenant furrowed his brow, mouthing a silent question. Gideon ignored him, pressing the phone closer to his ear. The sound of the rain against her car window filtered through the line — a hollow, rhythmic drumming.
“I have nothing left, Ben.” She sobbed, the anger finally bleeding through the despair. “They’re going to kick Chloe out of the clinic on Monday. The landlord is locking me out in three days. You knew what that money was for. You knew.”
She was hyperventilating now. The words tumbling out in a frantic, unspooling mess.
“I hate you. I don’t know how I’m going to survive this. I’m so tired. I’m just so tired. Please tell me you have a shred of humanity left and you’ll bring it back. Please.”
She fell silent, save for the wet, shuddering gasps for air. She waited for the familiar sound of Ben’s defensive whining or the harsh click of him hanging up.
Instead, a voice came through the speaker. Low. Resonant. A heavy baritone.
It didn’t sound like Ben. Ben’s voice was thin and nervous. This voice was heavy. It possessed the kind of quiet authority that made the hairs on the back of Mave’s neck stand up despite her grief.
“I need you to take a breath,” the man said.
Mave froze. The cold of the car suddenly felt suffocating. She pulled the phone away from her ear, staring at the screen for a panicked second before slowly bringing it back.
“Who — who is this?”
“Someone who has not been,” Gideon replied calmly. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his mahogany desk. He had spent the last ten hours dealing with liars, thieves, and murderers. The raw, unfiltered agony in this stranger’s voice was jarring. It was entirely out of place on a line meant for arranging felonies.
“I — I misdialed,” Mave stammered, embarrassment flooding through her, temporarily overriding the panic. “I’m so sorry. I thought — ”
“You’re short eight thousand dollars,” Gideon interrupted.
It wasn’t a question. He stated it as a fact.
“I shouldn’t have called. Forget it.”
She moved to hang up.
“Don’t hang up.”
The command wasn’t loud, but it possessed a gravity that stopped Mave’s thumb an inch from the red button.
“Why?” she whispered.
May you like
Gideon looked at the men sitting across from him. He looked at the ledgers detailing millions in illegal logistics. He looked at his own hands, scarred and calloused from a life that left no room for charity.
“Give me his last name,” Gideon said, his voice flat, dropping the temperature in the room by ten degrees. “And he won’t be breathing tomorrow.”
