Adeline closed her eyes. “Oh, fantastic.”
Elias ignored the boy. His mind was racing now, fitting pieces together with terrifying speed. “Where are the notes?”
Adeline crossed the room, opened a kitchen drawer, and handed him three folded pieces of paper. Elias read them, and his jaw tightened with each line.
The third note contained information that only five people in his entire organization possessed. Warehouse schedules. Route rotations. Names.
One of those five people was Rourke Delaney.
At that exact moment, as if summoned by the thought, his phone rang.
Rourke.
Chapter 6: The Call
Elias answered, his eyes never leaving Adeline’s face. “Where are you?”
“Driving,” Rourke said. “We have another problem. Adeline Hayes didn’t report home.”
Elias stared at Adeline. She was standing right in front of him, in her brother’s apartment, and Rourke was telling him she hadn’t reported home — as if he had been watching her building, waiting for her to arrive.
“How do you know?” Elias asked quietly.
Silence on the line.
Then Rourke laughed — a soft, terrible sound.
“You really shouldn’t ask questions you already know the answer to, Elias.”
The call ended.
Elias lowered the phone slowly. His mind replayed the last hour with brutal clarity: Rourke’s voice on the phone at 4:47, planting the seed — the maid has access to the basement — steering Elias toward Adeline like a man aiming a weapon. Rourke, one of only five people who knew what was in that third note. Rourke, who knew Adeline’s address well enough to know she “didn’t report home.”
The traitor wasn’t the maid counting coins at the pharmacy.
The traitor had been beside him all along.
Elias looked toward the broken door of apartment 4C. Footsteps sounded in the stairwell below. Several of them, climbing fast, not bothering to be quiet anymore.
Adeline whispered, “What’s happening?”
Elias reached for his phone and typed a single message to Bruno Marchetti — the one man in his crew he still trusted with his life: Chelsea. Now. Bring everyone.
Then he looked at Adeline, and for the first time that night, she saw something in his eyes that wasn’t suspicion or command. It was something almost like an apology.
“Your biggest problem,” he said, “is no longer stealing bread.”
“What is?”
He stepped between her and the door as the footsteps reached the landing.
“Someone knows I followed you.”
The stairwell went silent. A shadow moved across the frosted glass of the hallway window. Adeline grabbed her brother’s hand. Ben’s breathing quickened.
Elias Baron rolled his shoulders once, loosened his cuffs, and let the tattoos show — all of them, the full declaration of who he was and what he was capable of. Three years ago, a man named Daniel Hayes had pulled him from a burning car and asked for nothing. Tonight, in a leaking apartment in Chelsea, Elias intended to repay that debt in the only currency his world understood.
The door handle began to turn.
To be continued…