PART 6:

Then you need a lawyer who knows how to structure what you’re offering. And I need immunity for what I witnessed tonight, which is not nothing. Luciano sat back down. He looked at her across the table for a long time. “You just got out of a penthouse prison,” he said. “You don’t have shoes on. You’ve been shaking for the last 2 hours.

” “I know,” she said. “I’m still right.” The buzz came again from Enzo’s phone. He read it this time without looking up before he spoke. “Luciano, the property search.” A pause. It’s not three states. Pierce has a registered structure in Wyoming, 1,400 acres. The holding company bought it 18 months ago, same week the alderman crest story broke.

Lutaniano didn’t look away from Rowan. That’s where he’ll go, she said. Yes. And if he gets there before you reach him, he disappears the drive and everything on it. Luchiano stood including the folder. She understood Marco’s folder. Four years of unanswered questions, sitting inside a black drive in a penthouse that Declan Pierce was now racing away from in a car with plates they didn’t have toward a compound in the mountains of Wyoming.

I can identify the location of the drive, she said. I know the desk, the drawer, the laptop bag. If your people are still at the building, Pierce will have people there, too. Then you need to move faster than he does. Luchiano reached for his jacket. Enzo was already on his phone. Rowan stood up on legs that were not fully reliable and found that they held her anyway, which was something.

“I’m going with you,” she said. “No,” Luchiano said without pausing. “I’m the only person who can identify exactly where I said no.” “Luciano.” She said his name for the first time and he stopped. She hadn’t planned it. It was simply the word that cut through. He has people at that building who know my face. Your people don’t.

I know the apartment layout, every room, every camera, where the security panel is, which elevator opens where. You need me in there. He turned around. He looked at her for 5 seconds. She counted. You understand what you’re walking back into? He said, “Yes, if this goes wrong, if this goes wrong, it was already going wrong before tonight.” she said.

I just didn’t know it yet. He held her gaze for another two seconds and then he nodded once, the kind of nod that was also a door closing on the option of going back. Stay close, he said. Do exactly what I say when I say it, not a half second later. Understood. And put some shoes on, Enzo. Enzo was already opening a closet near the entryway.

He produced a pair of dark sneakers, set them on the floor without comment. She sat down, pulled them on. They were slightly too big. She laced them tight. When she stood back up, Luchiano was at the door, jacket on, phone in hand, running through something she couldn’t see on the screen. He looked up once, and something passed through his eyes that was almost almost something other than strategy.

It was gone before she could name it. The elevator descended. Somewhere across the city, in a car moving fast toward an airport she didn’t know about yet, Declan Pierce was making the phone call that would change the shape of the next 12 hours. The call that would tell the two men already positioned inside the penthouse that the drive needed to disappear before morning and that the woman who had read it needed to disappear with it.

What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t have calculated from the information he had was that Rowan Vale had already been in a room with the one person in Chicago who had both the resources and the personal reason to burn everything Declan had built to the ground, and she had just agreed to walk back through his door to help him do it.

The building looked the same from the outside. That was the thing that got her. standing in the back of the Escalade half a block south with Luchiano’s shoulder 6 in from hers and the rain finally easing to something that was more mist than water. 47 floors of glass and steel and the lobby lights still burning warm and gold the way they always did.

The kind of building that looked like safety from the street, like money and stability and the absence of bad things. She had felt that when she first moved in. She had been grateful for it. That memory sat in her chest now like something lodged wrong. How many of your people are already inside? She said two lobby level. They’ve been there since we left.

Pierce’s security will have the stairwells. I know. The service elevator requires a staff key card. There’s a panel behind the concierge desk. Bottom drawer left side. The building manager keeps a spare there because the regular staff lose them constantly. I saw him get it twice. Luchiano looked at her. I paid attention, she said.

I didn’t know why at the time. He was quiet for a moment and then he said, “Enzo.” And Enzo in the front seat relayed it in two sentences to whoever was on the other end of his earpiece. The plan, such as it was, had been built in the car on the way over. Luciano’s two men inside would neutralize Pierce’s security on the lobby level.

Rowan and Luchiano would take the service elevator to 52, walk the maintenance corridor to the stairwell, go up one floor, the apartment door. She knew the code, a six-digit sequence Declan had never bothered to change because he’d assumed she had no reason to use it without him. She knew it because she had watched him enter it 400 times, and she had a memory that retained numbers without being asked to.

What she didn’t know was what they were walking into on the other side. He could have people still in there, she said. Yes, the drive might already be gone. It might. And if it is, Luciano didn’t answer right away, which told her more than an answer would have. Then we find another way, he said.

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