Chapter 4
The cabin was soundproofed and leather-lined and smelled of new carpet, and the city went past the windows as a smear of orange and white with no sound attached to it at all.
Meline sat as far from Declan as the seat allowed, with his jacket pulled tight around her, and watched the lights of Lower Wacker go by without seeing a single one of them.
Twelve hours ago she had been arguing with a florist about peonies.
Declan reached into a panel beside the seat and poured water from a crystal decanter into a glass, and put it into her hands.
“Drink.”
She drank. Her teeth chattered against the rim.
“What happens now?” she said.
“When I get my money back from the Russians — what happens to me?”
He leaned back against the leather and looked at her for a moment, and his face was all shadow and passing streetlight.
“You think this is about the money.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Carmichael is going to pay for what he took with his life. The Volkovs are going to pay for stepping into my territory with blood.” He said it without emphasis, the way a man reads a schedule. “But you are the part of this that I didn’t plan for. You’re the unexpected variable, Meline.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
The Fitzpatrick penthouse sat on the top floor of the St. Regis, and it was everything the badge downstairs implied: floor-to-ceiling glass, black marble, Italian leather, and a view of the lake so wide and so dark that it looked less like water and more like the edge of the world.
Meline had showered in a bathroom larger than her apartment.
She had changed into silk pajamas that a housekeeper had laid out and left the room before she could thank her.
Dr. Gallagher had come and gone — a quiet, gray man with gentle hands and no questions — and had taken her blood pressure, listened to her heart, and left a mild sedative and a card with a phone number on it. The sedative had filed the sharp edges off her panic and left a cold clarity behind it.
She stood at the window with her hands wrapped around her own elbows and listened to the rain hammer the reinforced pane.
The double doors opened, and Declan came in.
He had changed too: dark slacks, a charcoal cashmere sweater that did nothing to make him look smaller. He crossed to an antique globe by the window, swung it open on its hinge — it was a bar — and poured himself a scotch.
“Are you feeling better?”
“Better is a relative term when you’re being hunted by the Bratva.” She turned around. “You said I was a loophole. What did you mean?”
Declan drank.
“My men intercepted Bradley,” he said. “He was sitting on the tarmac at O’Hare, strapped into a private Gulfstream chartered to Geneva. Two forged passports. A hard drive with the access codes to the Cayman accounts.”
Her stomach turned over. “Is he dead?”
“Not yet. He’s in my basement, having a painful conversation with Liam.” He set the glass down and took something out of the inside of his sweater — a folded piece of thick, watermarked parchment. “But before Liam started on his fingernails, Bradley told him something interesting.”
He held it out.
Meline took it.
Her hands still knew how to do this even now. She unfolded the page, and her trained eyes went down the dense legal text the way they had gone down a thousand documents before it, finding the operative clauses in the third paragraph the way you find a staircase in the dark.
And then the blood left her face.
“He didn’t just give them the deed,” she said.
“No.”
“He took out a policy.”
“Yes.”
“Key person insurance.” Her voice had gone flat. “On me.”
“Ten million dollars.” Declan said it quietly. “Payable to the primary shareholder of Hayes Holdings, LLC, on the death of the named key person. Corporately owned. Fully assignable. Bradley signed it in March, and last week he assigned the deed — and the policy that rides on it — to the Volkov organization in settlement of his debts.”
Meline read the clause again. Then again.
The Russians are the primary shareholders now.
She said it out loud, because saying it out loud was the only way she could make it real.
“The payout is ten million dollars. And the only way to collect it is if I die.”
“Yes.”
“In an accident.” Her voice was very steady and she did not recognize it. “A documented accident. Drowning. A hit-and-run. A fall. Something a coroner can sign.”
“Yes.”
She looked up at him, and for a moment she was not a woman in shock standing in a penthouse in borrowed pajamas. She was an auditor who had just found the fraud in the ledger, and the fraud was her own death, and the entry was dated and initialed and had been sitting in plain sight for months.
“I signed nothing,” she said. “I never signed anything. He took my name off the top of a tax return and he built this on top of it, and he did it in a room he shared with me, and I made him coffee while he did it.”
“Bradley Carmichael is a dead man,” Declan said. “He just hasn’t been informed.”
The parchment slipped out of her fingers and see-sawed down to the black marble floor.
Her knees went.
He crossed the room before she fell. One arm caught her around the waist and gathered her up against him, and she ended up with her face pressed into the front of his sweater and both fists closed around the cashmere, and the sound she made was not a word in any language.
“I’m dead,” she said, into his chest. “They’re going to kill me. There’s nowhere I can go. They have money and they have lawyers and they have — they have time, Declan, they don’t have to do it this week—”
“Look at me.”
She looked up.
May you like
His hands came up and framed her face, and his eyes were not cold now. They were doing something she had never seen a man’s eyes do.
“You are not going to die,” he said. “I told you — you’re the loophole.”
