Chapter 1 - Fourteen Minutes Late
I was fourteen minutes late to a meeting with a man who considered lateness a warning.
I apologized while blood ran down the inside of my boot.
The silver flash drive hidden inside my coat pocket was worth more than my brother’s life, and somebody inside Gabriel Cross’s company already knew I had it.
Gabriel checked his watch at exactly 9:14 p.m.
I know because I saw him do it.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of his forty-seventh-floor office, rain battered downtown Chicago hard enough to erase the edges of buildings. The skyline had become nothing but wet streaks of white, gold, and electric blue.
Inside, everything remained unnervingly perfect.
Dark cedar walls.
Black marble floors.
A crystal glass of bourbon beside Gabriel’s right hand.
An untouched cigar resting in a heavy ashtray.
No clutter.
No unnecessary movement.
Gabriel Cross did not live like a man who expected chaos.
He lived like a man who believed chaos could be trained.
Then I walked into his office carrying enough of it for both of us.
“Sorry I’m late.”
My voice sounded smaller than I wanted.
Gabriel’s gaze lifted from his watch.
He didn’t speak.
I had spent two weeks working under an agreement that should never have existed.
I was a forensic accountant who had spent most of my career finding missing money for people who preferred spreadsheets to guns.
Gabriel Cross preferred both.
His legitimate empire stretched across shipping, construction, private security, real estate, and logistics. Newspapers called him a controversial businessman. Federal investigators called him a person of interest. Men who owed him money called him nothing at all.
My younger brother Toby had made the mistake of borrowing from men connected to the Russo family.
I had made the larger mistake of believing I could fix it alone.
Gabriel had offered me a deal.
Trace a series of suspicious payments moving through his companies.
Find out who was siphoning money.
Give him the evidence.
In return, he would make Toby’s debt disappear.
Simple.
Except nothing around Gabriel Cross was ever simple.
His eyes moved slowly down my body.
Wet hair stuck to my face.
My lower lip was split.
The sleeve of my rust-colored coat was torn near the elbow.
My right hand was locked around the doorframe because without it I wasn’t completely sure I could stay upright.
Then he saw my leg.
A dark stain had spread through my trousers.
One drop fell to his floor.
Then another.
Gabriel stood.
I tried to walk.
My knee folded.
The room tipped sideways.
I remember the brass door handle leaving my fingers.
Then Gabriel was moving.
Fast.
Much faster than a man wearing a tailored suit had any right to move.
He caught me underneath the arms just before my temple struck the corner of his desk.
The impact pushed the breath from my lungs.
For one strange second, my cheek pressed against the center of his chest.
His shirt was warm.
I was freezing.
“Harper.”
That frightened me more than anger would have.
Gabriel Cross never sounded frightened.
“I brought it.”
His grip tightened.
“What?”
“The drive.”
My fingers had gone numb. I shoved my hand inside my coat pocket until I found the small piece of cold metal.
I held it between us.
“The reconciliation. Vendor map. Access history. Payment routes. Everything you asked for.”
Gabriel looked at the drive for less than a second.
Then back at me.
“Put it away.”
“You said tonight.”
“Harper.”
“Tell me Toby’s clear.”
His jaw flexed.
“We’ll discuss Toby later.”
“No.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“We had a deal.”
“You can barely stand.”
“We had a deal.”
Something changed in his eyes.
Not anger.
Decision.
“The deal is over.”
My stomach dropped.
“Toby—”
“His debt was resolved through counsel at six-thirty.”
I stopped breathing.
“What?”
“The Russo note was purchased and extinguished.”
“But I didn’t sign anything.”
“My attorney sent the acknowledgment three hours ago.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“You were supposed to sign it tonight.”
My fingers loosened.
The flash drive hit the hardwood.
Gabriel never looked down.
“You didn’t need to come here.”
“I didn’t know.”
His voice became quieter.
“Who did this?”
I looked away.
That was my mistake.
Gabriel noticed everything.
He moved one hand beneath my elbow.
“Harper.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“Why?”
His eyes hardened.
“Because someone injured a woman carrying stolen records from my company while she was coming to meet me.”
“It wasn’t—”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not.”
“You looked away.”
“That isn’t evidence.”
“It is when you do it.”
Despite everything, a humorless laugh escaped me.
“Do you interrogate everyone like this?”
“No.”
His gaze dropped to the blood.
“Usually they’re standing.”
He guided me into the nearest leather chair.
I resisted.
“Don’t.”
“You can sit voluntarily or collapse involuntarily.”
“I need the drive.”
He picked it up.
My chest tightened.
“Gabriel.”
“It’s right here.”
“Don’t open it.”
He looked at me.
“Excuse me?”
“Not yet.”
I saw the first spark of real suspicion.
“You brought me a drive containing evidence from my own company and now you don’t want me to read it?”
“Because I don’t know who can see what you open on this network.”
His expression changed completely.
The room seemed colder.
“What did you find?”
I swallowed.
“The vendor irregularities weren’t outside fraud.”
“I assumed that.”
“They weren’t accounting errors either.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s not like you.”
“I know.”
His thumb moved slowly over the edge of the drive.
“I traced twenty-seven payments through four shell vendors. They all looked unrelated until I checked access timestamps.”
He waited.
“The approvals were being entered after midnight.”
“By whom?”
“The credentials changed.”
“Impossible.”
“That’s what I thought.”
I wiped rainwater from my cheek.
Or maybe it was sweat.
“The same machine was logging in under different executive accounts. Yours. Marcus Vale’s. Daniel Shaw’s. Two board members. Even mine once I got temporary access.”
Gabriel went still.
Marcus Vale was his chief operating officer.
Daniel Shaw ran corporate security.
Both men had been with him for years.
Both had access to almost everything.
“Continue.”
“The payments weren’t just stealing money.”
“What were they doing?”
“They were buying information.”
“What information?”
“Employee schedules. Shipping manifests. Safe-house leases. Private security rotations.”
Gabriel’s eyes sharpened.
“And?”
“Debt portfolios.”
He said nothing.
My throat tightened.
“Personal debts connected to employees. Family members. Contractors. Anyone vulnerable.”
“Toby.”
I nodded.
For the first time, Gabriel looked at the flash drive as though it might explode.
“That’s why his debt kept changing,” I said. “Every time I thought I had the number, somebody added penalties.”
“You told me Russo controlled the note.”
“I thought he did.”
“He didn’t?”
“No.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.”
“That answer is becoming irritating.”
“I almost died getting here. You think I enjoy not knowing?”
He crouched in front of me.
That surprised me more than anything else.
Gabriel Cross did not crouch for people.
He rested one hand against the arm of the chair.
“Start at the beginning.”
So I told him.
At 7:20 that evening, I had left the temporary office he’d given me in one of his downtown buildings.
At 7:31, I realized the same gray sedan had followed me through three turns.
At 7:42, someone tried to force me against the curb.
At 7:50, I abandoned my car in a parking garage.
At 8:03, two men found me near Wabash.
At 8:11, one of them told me to hand over “Cross’s little silver problem.”
At 8:13, I ran.
I did not tell Gabriel exactly how the cut on my leg happened.
Not yet.
I did tell him I escaped through the service corridor of a closed restaurant and spent almost an hour moving through alleys, train platforms, and building lobbies because I was afraid they had access to Gabriel’s security cameras.
When I finished, his expression was terrifyingly calm.
“Did either man use a name?”
“No.”
“Accent?”
“Local.”
“Professional?”
“Yes.”
“Russo?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“Because one of them said Russo had become inconvenient.”
Gabriel’s gaze snapped to mine.
“What exactly did he say?”
I remembered the man’s hand around my wrist.
The smell of cigarette smoke.
The knife glinting under a streetlight.
And the sentence he whispered when he realized I wouldn’t give him the drive.
“Russo was useful until Cross bought the debt.”
Gabriel rose.
“Anything else?”
I hesitated.
“Harper.”
“He said the next person who tried to help Toby would end up like Russo.”
Gabriel walked to his desk and picked up his phone.
“Who are you calling?”
“My doctor.”
“No hospitals.”
“Did I say hospital?”
He spoke into the phone.
“Forty-seven. Now.”
Then he hung up.
“You have a doctor who makes office calls?”
“I have people who understand discretion.”
“Must be nice.”
“It is.”
He reached for a laptop.
I grabbed his wrist.
The movement pulled at my injured leg and pain flashed white behind my eyes.
Gabriel looked down at my hand on him.
I released him immediately.
“Sorry.”
“You were telling me not to open it.”
“Not on anything connected to your network.”
“What do you suggest?”
“An isolated machine.”
“I have one.”
“Of course you do.”
For the first time that night, the corner of his mouth almost moved.
He crossed to a locked cabinet behind the desk and removed a plain black laptop.
No company branding.
No network connection.
He placed it on the table.
The doctor arrived while Gabriel was starting the machine.
Dr. Elena Marquez looked nothing like the kind of person I expected a mafia boss to summon in the middle of a storm.
She was in her fifties, silver-haired, calm, and unimpressed by Gabriel.
She examined my leg and announced that the cut was deep but had missed major vessels.
“You need stitches.”
“No hospital.”
“I can do them here.”
I looked at Gabriel.
He leaned against the desk, arms folded.
“Apparently democracy has ended,” I muttered.
“It never began.”
Elena almost smiled.
Twenty minutes later, my leg was bandaged, my lip cleaned, and my head slightly clearer.
Gabriel sat across from me with the isolated laptop.
The flash drive rested between us.
“Ready?” he asked.
“No.”
He inserted it anyway.
The folders appeared.
Vendor reconciliation.
Access histories.
Debt portfolio mapping.
Internal communications.
Then a fifth folder I had never created.
Gabriel noticed it at the same time I did.
“What is that?”
My skin went cold.
The folder was titled:
H.M.
My initials.
Harper Monroe.
“I didn’t put that there.”
Gabriel’s eyes moved to me.
“Could someone have accessed the drive?”
“No.”
“You’re certain?”
“I encrypted it and kept it with me.”
He clicked.
A password request appeared.
Underneath it was one sentence.
ASK HARPER ABOUT THE NIGHT HER FATHER DIED.
The room disappeared around me.
Gabriel looked at my face.
“Harper?”
I couldn’t answer.
Because my father had died twelve years earlier in what police called a highway accident.
And there were only three people in the world who knew I had never believed that story.
Me.
Toby.
And the anonymous person who had mailed me photographs from the crash six months after the funeral.
Gabriel read the sentence again.
Then another line appeared beneath it.
A countdown.
00:09:59.
00:09:58.
00:09:57.
Gabriel stood.
“What happens when that reaches zero?”
“I don’t know.”
Then a new message filled the screen.
IF YOU’RE READING THIS IN GABRIEL CROSS’S OFFICE, HE HAS ALREADY BEEN BETRAYED.
And beneath it came a name.
A name I recognized immediately.
A man Gabriel trusted enough to give unrestricted access to the forty-seventh floor.
May you like
Daniel Shaw.
---
