Elias had searched for that stranger afterward. He had put out word through every channel he controlled. The man had vanished as completely as if the rain had washed him away.
Now the stranger stared back at him from a framed photograph on a peeling apartment wall.
“Who is that?” Ben asked quietly, following Elias’s gaze. Adeline turned — and froze. She had seen Elias’s reflection in the window. She stepped between Elias and her brother in a single movement, her body a shield.
“What are you doing here?”
Elias entered slowly, his eyes never leaving the photograph.
“I could ask you the same thing about my bread.”
Adeline went pale. Ben looked between them, confused and frightened.
“Addie?”
She lifted her chin, and Elias recognized the courage it took — a young maid, alone, standing up to the most dangerous man in Boston.
“If you’re firing me, fire me. But the food was being thrown away.”
“I’m not here about the bread.”
Elias pointed at the photograph.
“Who is that man?”
Adeline’s expression changed — the defiance draining out of it, replaced by something older and heavier.
“My father.”
Elias stopped breathing for a moment.
“What was his name?”
“Daniel Hayes.”
“When did he die?”
“Three years ago.”
Elias’s voice dropped to barely a whisper.
“How?”
Adeline hesitated. Then she answered, and the answer rearranged everything Elias thought he knew about the last three years of his life.
“He saved a stranger from a burning car.”
For the first time in years, Elias Baron — the man who had ordered men buried and empires burned — had absolutely nothing to say.
Chapter 4: The Debt That Could Never Be Repaid
“You followed me across the city because of bread?” Adeline asked, her arms folded tight across her chest.
“No,” Elias said.
“Then why?”
Elias looked around the apartment. The heater rattled against the wall. A plastic bucket beneath the window caught water dripping from the ceiling in a slow, steady rhythm. On a small table beside a battered laptop sat a stack of envelopes, and even from across the room Elias could read the red stamp on the top one: FINAL NOTICE. Beneath it: PAST DUE. COLLECTION NOTICE.
Ben watched him with open suspicion. “You’re her boss?”
“Yes.”