Chapter 6
Kavanagh arrived at seven in the morning with wet shoes and a briefcase and a face like a man who had not slept, which he hadn’t.
He was the Fitzpatrick family’s attorney and had been for thirty-one years. He had never once asked a question he didn’t already know the answer to, and he did not ask one now.
He spread the papers out on the dining table and walked her through it in eleven minutes.
“Your dilution authority as CEO is solid. The judge will look at the timing and pull a face, and then he’ll sign it, because you’re the last legally appointed officer of that company and no one has rebutted it.” He turned a page. “The problem is not the dilution. The problem is the window.”
“How long?”
“Volkov’s motion for a receiver goes up Thursday at ten. If we file the share issuance and the spousal transfer before that, Judge Halloran has a finished thing in front of him and no live controversy to appoint a receiver over. If we file after, we’re arguing a motion, and I have never in thirty-one years won an argument against a Federalist Society judge with a syndicate’s filing fee in his inbox.”
Meline looked at the page.
“Thursday,” she said. “That’s two days.”
“That’s one day,” Kavanagh said. “The registry closes at four on Wednesday. And you need a notary present when you sign, and a license, and a judge to waive the waiting period.”
“Marriage licenses in Illinois have a one-day waiting period,” she said.
That was the auditor again. Kavanagh looked at her with the first flicker of something other than professional patience.
“They do. Which is why we need Judge Halloran’s colleague on the bench — a man named Vellucci, who owes the Fitzpatricks nothing but dislikes Ivan Volkov a great deal.” He tapped the file. “It’s doable. It is not comfortable.”
“Do it,” Declan said.
It was the first thing he had said in twenty minutes.
Meline spent the morning in a guest room on the phone.
She called her firm and left a message with HR saying she was taking personal leave due to a family matter, and did not say what the family matter was, because there were two men in the living room of the penthouse who would have listened to every word.
She called her landlord and said she would not be renewing.
She sat on the edge of the bed afterward with the phone face down in her lap and thought about the fact that in three phone calls she had erased the entire life she had spent eight years assembling.
At noon, Liam knocked.
“Miss Hayes.”
“What.”
“Dr. Gallagher is downstairs. He needs to take photographs.”
She looked up.
“Of what?”
“Of you.” Liam’s face was perfectly blank, and she understood that this was not cruelty, that it was simply the shape of the work he did. “The Volkovs filed a motion asserting that you are a danger to yourself and others. Our counsel needs a medical record dated today showing that you are not.”
She sat there.
“That’s what they’re going to do,” she said slowly. “That’s the whole play. They don’t need a car to hit me. They just need a judge to say I’m not fit to run the company, and then they take the company, and then—”
“Yes,” Liam said.
“And then a coroner signs a piece of paper.”
“Yes.”
She went downstairs and let a doctor photograph her hands and her wrists and her throat and her eyes, and she did not cry, because crying was evidence and she had finally, fully understood what room she was standing in.
The hit came at nine forty that evening.
Meline was in the living room when the elevator chimed, and she did not think anything of it, because the elevator had chimed nine times that day.
Then she heard Liam say, very quietly and very clearly: “Get down.”
The doors opened onto three men with suppressed weapons.
Liam was already moving. He put two rounds into the first one before the second one had cleared the doors, and the second one went down into the frame, and the third one got off a shot that went through the marble to her left and took a piece of the bookcase with it.
Meline went flat on the floor behind the sofa with her hands over the back of her neck.
It went on for nine seconds.
When she lifted her head, the elevator was a ruin of light and smoke, two men were down and not moving, and the third was being dragged backward into the car by one leg by Declan Fitzpatrick, who did not look at her at all while he did it.
Liam was on the floor.
He was on his knees and then he was on his side, with one hand pressed against his own shirt, and there was blood coming through his fingers in a way that Meline recognized instantly from a first-aid course she had taken at the firm, from the way the blood came in a steady unbroken rope rather than in spurts — no, she thought. No, no, no.
Declan was beside him before she had finished the thought.
“Liam.”
“Boss.”
“Ambulance is coming. Hold on.”
“Don’t.” Liam’s voice was clear and light, and that was the worst part, because he sounded like a man making a reasonable point in a meeting. “It’s through. It’s through, okay. Don’t do that.”
“Liam—”
“Do the thing.” Liam’s hand came up and caught the sleeve of Declan’s sweater, and left a print of blood on the charcoal cashmere that would never come out. “Whatever it is. The paper thing. Do it fast. They wanted to be through with her before Thursday too.”
His eyes moved, with effort, to Meline on the floor by the sofa.
“Sorry,” he said. “About your apartment.”
Then he stopped.
Meline sat on the marble with her back against the sofa for a long time after the room had filled up with Fitzpatrick men and paramedics and men in suits who said nothing.
Declan stood in the middle of his own living room with a dead man’s handprint on his sleeve and did not wipe it off.
When the elevator had been cordoned and the bodies covered and the door closed, he walked over to her.
“Two days,” he said. His voice was flat and terrible. “It has to be tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” she said.
She looked up at him. Her hands were shaking so badly that she had to press them flat against the floor.
May you like
“I did this,” she said.
“Yes,” Declan said. “You did. And now you’re going to do the other thing too.”
