Chapter 18
Istared at the message longer than necessary.
Dr. Malcolm Virelli. Recently purchased property in The Slopes. Interested in full curatorial acquisition. Contemporary Black masters. Select Harlem Renaissance if available. Discretion required.
I won’t be on site. Please let yourself in. Lockbox code attached. Begin evaluation.
Discretion required.
That part didn’t raise an eyebrow. My entire career was built on discretion.
Ellison Advisory Group existed because collectors—old money, new money, quiet money—rarely wanted their names attached to what they loved.
Or what they were chasing. Or what had landed in their possession without a clean paper trail.
Privacy wasn’t an exception in my world. It was the product.
Still.
Something about the tone felt… clipped. Impersonal. Like it had been drafted by someone who didn’t care whether I accepted the job or declined it outright.
I didn’t need the work. Not even a little.
Between standing contracts, private collections, and the consulting I still did for KIB, my calendar was already curated within an inch of its life.
I found myself wondering how he’d gotten my number in the first place.
I didn’t advertise. I was referred. Always referred.
Which meant someone I respected had handed it over expecting me to treat this seriously.
Professionalism before instinct. That was the rule. At worst, this would be an hour of my time.
My process was simple, even if clients liked to pretend it was mysterious.
First, I walked the space. Let it talk. Architecture always revealed intention—what could live there, what shouldn’t, what the collector thought they wanted versus what they actually needed.
Then I listened. If they were present, we spoke.
If they weren’t, I studied what they’d left behind.
Notes. Existing pieces. Sightlines. Light.
From there, I decided whether the project deserved me. Not the other way around.
If it required too much force, too much convincing, too much performance, I declined. I didn’t build collections. I translated them, and that was an intimate experience.
I chewed on my lip a moment—my intuition warring with my ambition.
Ambition won.
Understood. I’ll be there at four.
The Slopes had always felt like a part of Pittsburgh, the city hadn’t quite decided how to talk about. Not hidden, not exclusive. Just… removed. A place you drove to on purpose. No one ended up here by accident.
The climb was slow, the streets narrowing as they wound upward, old brick houses dug stubbornly into the hillside while newer builds tried to assert themselves in steel and glass.
Money had been working its way in for years, but it hadn’t erased the sense that this land belonged first to gravity, then to whoever was willing to fight it.
I eased the car higher, the engine quiet beneath me, aware of the silence in a way that had nothing to do with sound. No contractors. No parked vans. No half-finished landscaping projects. Just stillness pressing against the windows.
I didn’t need this client. That thought surfaced again, uninvited.
I had more work than I could reasonably accept.
More collectors than I cared to juggle. Whoever referred him had weight, though, and weight meant I showed up, listened, evaluated.
That was the agreement I made with the world that paid me.
Still, I found myself wondering how Dr. Malcolm Virelli had gotten my private number.
The house appeared at the top of the rise like it had been placed there rather than built.
Sharp angles. Black siding. Walls of glass reflecting nothing but sky, as if it were trying to detach itself from the city below.
No signs of life. No indication anyone had ever carried a box across its threshold.
I parked my silver Mercedes AMG coupe along the curb and stepped out, pulling my coat closer as the wind caught it.
The leather was warm against my hands, the fur collar brushing my jaw, grounding in its familiarity.
I dressed like this for meetings where men tried to measure me before they listened to me. Armor mattered. Presentation mattered.
Up here, though, it felt like I’d dressed for an audience that hadn’t shown up.
The lockbox was exactly where his message said it would be. The code worked. The key turned without resistance.
Inside, the house greeted me with a vast, echoing emptiness that swallowed the sound of my heels. No hum of appliances. No shifting air vents. Just space—wide, deliberate, and uninhabited. It didn’t feel unfinished. It felt paused.
“Hello?” I called, already knowing I wouldn’t get an answer.
My voice carried across polished concrete and disappeared.
I walked further in, letting my fingers skim the wall out of habit. Fresh paint. No marks. No warmth. Whoever owned this place hadn’t lived in it long enough to leave an imprint. Maybe not at all.
That wasn’t unusual for some of my clients. They bought properties the way others bought portfolios. Still, even the most detached collectors left something behind—a catalog, a glass, a presence.
Here, there was nothing.
I shifted into work mode anyway. It was second nature.
Documentation first. Interpretation later.
My phone came up, capturing angles, sightlines, scale.
If this was legitimate, the entry could anchor a monumental portrait.
Something unapologetic. Something rooted in legacy rather than trend.
The stair landing begged for sculpture—weight, tension, interruption of all this clean geometry.
The architecture wanted art. It had been designed for it.
Which made the absence louder.
My phone vibrated in my hand.
Begin upstairs. Primary suite walls are reinforced. Ideal for heavier installations.
I stared at the message.
He hadn’t asked if I’d arrived.
Hadn’t asked what I thought. Just… instructed. A thin thread of unease slid into place.
I hadn’t told him where I was standing. I hadn’t told him I was inside.
I typed back, keeping it neutral.
You have interior cameras?
No reply.
The silence felt different this time. Not absence. Pressure. Like the house itself was holding its breath with me inside it.
I should have walked out then. Told myself the project wasn’t the right fit. Sent a courteous decline and gone back to the life I understood. There were other clients. Real ones. People who answered their phones.
Instead, I looked toward the staircase.
Curiosity has undone smarter people than me.
I climbed.
Halfway up, the air changed.
At first it registered as nothing more than the sterile scent of new construction—drywall dust, adhesives, something industrial and forgettable. But then it thickened. Turned bitter. Coated the back of my throat.
Smoke.
And where there’s smoke—
I stopped moving.
Listened.
The house answered with a faint crackle. Then another. Soft. Patient. Like someone folding paper too close to a flame.
My stomach dropped.
When I turned back toward the stairs, I saw them—thin gray ribbons slipping upward along the edges of the steps. Not rushing. Not chaotic. Controlled. Intentional.
At the far wall, something glowed.
A low orange pulse showed through a seam so fine I might have missed it seconds earlier. It flickered once. Then again. Small. Hungry. Alive.
Heat brushed the soles of my shoes. This was real. This was happening.
My chest tightened, my breath shortening before panic could even form words. The quiet of the house collapsed into sound—the ticking expansion of materials, the faint rush of something feeding below me, the fragile architecture of safety coming apart piece by piece.
I was alone.
No—
My thumb found Tariq before my brain could argue. I dropped the pin and texted, HURRY. Then I hit 911. The operator answered calmly. Steady. A human voice in the middle of something that suddenly felt designed to erase me.
As I gave the address, a sharp pop cracked from below. Glass breaking. The sound of fire finding oxygen.
And as I spoke, as the first pop of breaking glass echoed from below, the realization settled in with chilling clarity. This wasn’t a bad appointment, and this wasn’t a strange client. I had been placed here. And they wanted me dead.
My God!
And I needed Tariq to find me before they succeeded.