Chapter 2 - The Man Outside Room 114 Had Orders to Bring Her Home—But He Was Hiding a Secret of His Own
“Dana. Dante wants you to come home.”
Marcus Vane spoke through the motel door as calmly as if he were delivering room service. I stood beside the window with my laptop under one arm and a tire iron in my other hand. I had no intention of opening that door.
“Tell him I don't have a home,” I said.
A silence. Then: “The men behind me aren't all mine.”
That changed the arithmetic. I counted four shadows outside, but only two stood where Marcus would have placed them. The others were watching the stairwell, not the door. Men waiting for someone to emerge, rather than men preparing to enter.
“Who are they?”
“Celeste's people. She offered them fifteen million to make sure you never get back to New York.”
My fingers tightened around the iron. “You expect me to believe you're protecting me?”
“No. I expect you to believe she doesn't want you talking.”
A sharp metallic sound came from the walkway. Marcus shouted, “Down!”
The first shot punched through the door at shoulder height. I dropped behind the bed as plaster burst over the carpet. Another shot shattered the television. Outside, someone screamed. I crawled to the bathroom and slammed its door, but I had already memorized the layout: a ventilation opening above the tub led to the maintenance crawlspace. I dragged the plastic laundry hamper beneath it and climbed.
The grate gave under the tire iron. I pulled myself into a space smelling of dust and hot wiring. Below me, the bathroom door splintered. Boots crossed the tiles. I held my breath while a man said, “She's gone.”
The crawlspace opened above the laundry room. I dropped onto a dryer, twisted my ankle, and limped toward the back exit. A hand caught my wrist.
I swung the iron. Marcus caught it before it reached his face.
“Don't,” he said. Blood darkened his sleeve. “I'm the only reason you're still breathing.”
“You killed Rocco.”
His expression changed. “Rocco is alive. I sent him away before Dante could reach him.”
I wanted that to be true so badly it frightened me.
Marcus handed me a phone. On its screen, a video showed Rocco sitting at a kitchen table, bruised but breathing, holding today's newspaper. “I'm sorry, Dana,” he said. “They knew about the phone. Marcus got me out.”
“Where is he?” I demanded.
“Somewhere nobody will find him. We need to move.”
A sedan rolled around the corner, its headlights sweeping the alley. Marcus pulled me behind a dumpster. The driver climbed out, spoke into his radio, and started toward the laundry room. Marcus raised his weapon, then lowered it when a woman in a motel uniform crossed between them.
That restraint surprised me more than the gunfire.
We reached a battered pickup parked behind a neighboring diner. Marcus tossed me the keys.
“You drive. I can't trust myself to stay conscious much longer.”
I glanced at his bleeding arm. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because your old supervisor, Hugh Bell, was my brother-in-law.”
The world seemed to tilt. “Hugh is dead.”
“I know. And I know who ordered it.”
“Dante?”
Marcus looked away. “That's what I thought for three years.”
I drove until the motel's neon disappeared behind the hills. Marcus directed me to an abandoned ranger station outside town, where a medical kit waited beneath a loose floorboard. While I cleaned his wound, he told me what he had never dared say inside the Valerio organization.
Hugh had been investigating a network of offshore shipping companies before I found the same irregularities. He had called Marcus the night before he vanished, claiming he had discovered a partnership between the Rossi operation and a powerful family whose name had been deliberately scrubbed from the books.
“The Fiores,” I whispered.
Marcus nodded. “Celeste's father has been financing half the city's violence and blaming Dante for it. Hugh had proof. I think you found the same proof without realizing what it meant.”
I remembered the Rossi ledger beneath my diamond choker. The entries I'd frozen were not random. Several transactions shared a strange five-digit approval code. I had assumed it belonged to an internal accounting officer. Now I wondered if it was a signature.
“Why hasn't Dante stopped Celeste?”
“Because he thinks marrying her is the only way to keep the families from going to war.”
I laughed once, bitterly. “He could have told me.”
“He should have.” Marcus winced as I wrapped his arm. “But he believes everyone he loves becomes leverage.”
“Don't use that word.”
“Love?”
“He doesn't get to call what he did love.”
Marcus didn't argue. He reached inside his jacket and removed a folded photograph. It showed Hugh Bell standing beside a woman I recognized immediately: Celeste Fiore. Behind them, reflected in a restaurant window, was Dante's late father.
On the back, in Hugh's familiar handwriting, were six words: IF I DISAPPEAR, ASK ABOUT BLACKWATER.
I stared at the photograph until the letters blurred. Blackwater was the code name for a dormant trust I'd seen in the books, a trust holding assets no one had touched in twenty years.
My burner rang. An unknown number.
I answered without speaking.
“Dana.” Dante's voice came through the line, rough and unfamiliar. “Please don't hang up.”
For three years, he had never said please.
“You have ten seconds,” I told him.
“I was wrong.”
“Eight.”
“Celeste has people looking for you. Marcus told me about the attack. I never sent anyone to hurt you.”
“Five.”
“Dana, listen. The money you moved—”
I almost smiled. Of course. The money.
“—isn't mine,” he finished. “It's evidence. And if Celeste gets it back, she'll kill everyone who can explain where it came from.”
My heart lurched.
“Then you'd better explain fast,” I said.
A crash sounded on his end. Someone shouted. Dante's voice dropped to a whisper.
“Blackwater,” he said. “Whatever you do, don't open Blackwater alone.”
The line went dead.
And beside me, Marcus went completely still.
“Dana,” he said, “there's something else you need to know. Hugh wasn't the only person who disappeared because of that trust.”
May you like
“Who else?”
“Your mother.”
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