Chapter 13 Marcus
MARCUS
Liam stands at the edge of the floor-to-ceiling windows that frame West Chelsea. The rooftops are dim in the dark, the Hudson is barely visible, and the High Line is traced by its low nighttime lights.
I fought for this place harder than I did my Lloyd Harbor home.
I won it in a bidding war that stretched late into a January night.
Industrial bones, river air, five minutes from Avelis.
Every inch of it is chosen for function and proximity.
But ultimately, this apartment exists because I refused to lose.
Lloyd Harbor came earlier. I purchased it outright with hardly any competition. I took it assuming I wouldn’t always be alone. At the time, it felt reasonable. Sensible, even. A place meant for a life that would eventually arrive. But it’s still waiting.
Liam moves. “Tell me your business with the Marrowby tenants is dead and buried,” he says.
“It is. They’re in their new condos,” I reply.
He narrows his eyes. “No one’s feeling sentimental about that old Bronx address? No last-minute crusader trying to burn The Trap to the ground?”
“Sabine checked in with one of the mothers. There was no heat in her voice. They’re not longing for that shithole.”
“Keep it that way.”
“If they wanted to destroy something of mine, they would’ve gone after Avelis,” I say.
“You’re right. What about her?”
“You’re fishing for bias, Liam. Fine, I think she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Not her her. I mean Belladonna.”
I sigh, wishing I hadn’t responded so fast.
He adds, “It’d be smart of her to hire another woman to do the dirty work against you.”
“As it turns out, Belladonna just married a man who owns a quarter of the shipping lanes in the Americas. Why would she bother with me? Why risk exposing her history?”
“Huh,” Liam mutters with a sigh, rubbing the side of his head like he’s taking on a headache for both of us.
The intercom buzzes. Max is downstairs, waiting for access to my sky garage, a private bay that opens straight into my elevator. Another reason this penthouse is worth every obscene dollar. There is no lobby, no witnesses, no surprises.
Max enters with his laptop in hand. “Sorry, I’m late.”
He drops into a chair without invitation.
“Why does he get away with being late?” I ask.
“Because I brought something,” he answers, already queuing the enhanced footage from the east cellar. We’ve watched it dozens of times, but tonight, the resolution is sharper. Less forgiving.
“So the prick jumps through the window,” Liam narrates, leaning in. “Then disappears behind that corner wine rack. And he stays there.”
“Then Iris comes in,” Max says.
The sight of her tightens something at the back of my neck. She’s too beautiful for the shit she’s stepped into. Beautiful enough to make the motive feel like a bruise.
“Steady, Doc,” Max murmurs, watching me instead of the footage. Liam’s oblivious, tracking the angles.
“Anything else we’ve got on her?” I ask.
“No debts. No enemies. No signs of coercion or bribery. No pattern of compromised decisions or questionable circles,” Max says. “At least, not the kind that explains her scaling rooftops and triggering a breach.”
“But she’s struggling, isn’t she? She hasn’t created in a while, and from the gallery chatter, she was just rejected by Maurice LeBlanc,” I say, recalling the hideous polka-dot painting in her room.
“And he disappears!” Liam snaps, still glued to the clip. “Replay that.”
“Pay attention, Doc,” Max adds, needling.
The clip rolls again.
“There’s something in that corner,” I say. “He’s not a magician. He doesn’t vanish without help.”
I stand, my decision made. “I’m going. Liam, clear security.”
It’s protocol. Because I have my own way into The Gallows, my own disappearing act, and no one sees Marcus Lockwood wandering the open parts of The Trap.
Not if they want to keep their eyes.
My entrance to The Velvet Trap isn’t inside the manor at all.
It starts behind the building, through a stand of trees separating our property from the one behind it, and it leads to a private garage.
My plates trigger the gate, and biometrics handle the rest. The elevator there only recognizes the Hunts and me.
The lift opens straight into The Gallows. The monitors are dark, and the windows look out onto an empty room. There’s no Game, no event tonight.
I take the ladder up into the attic.
The hole in the slate has already been patched.
Scaffolding stands between the beams, and the smell of extinguished smoke still lingers in the rafters.
We fed our members the official line: an electrical fault, minor damage, handled before it became anything serious.
There was no police investigation. My own men handled the sweep, and my contracted fire crew handled containment.
The Trap will reopen this coming weekend.
I stand near the spot where she’d clung to the beam, where I caught her, held her, and felt her breath breaking against my collar.
The what-ifs strike differently tonight. Not about The Trap. About her.
I retrace my steps. I left the attic through the Underwing. This section escaped the fire, seeing as the scorch line ends a few feet back.
An object near the step catches my eye.
A suede stiletto, the heel knife-thin and dusted in soot. Her size.
I pick it up and turn it in my hand. My finger finds the inside edge where her foot would have pressed, where she must have been shaking when I carried her in.
Iris Vaughn.
Too bold for her own safety? Used by whoever was with her, then left to burn under my roof?
I scoff. The leather of her shoe holds a trace of warmth from the work lights overhead.
Her behavior didn’t fit. The way her body responded, she was far too keyed in to be someone left behind.
Whoever set the fire had a plan. But Iris ran on instinct that night, not strategy.
Logic says I can’t rule her out. Experience says even the quiet ones can be lethal. Belladonna played harmlessly, right up until she didn’t. Iris Vaughn could be the same. At the very least, she saw something.
I slide the stiletto into my inner jacket pocket. It’s not staying behind. I leave the attic, pull on a white ski mask so no camera catches my face, and make my way toward the east cellar. I rarely cross The Trap as Marcus Lockwood, but tonight, I don’t have a choice.
I follow the corner shown in the footage, moving behind the wine rack. The walls look solid. No marks, no disturbance. I drop lower, bracing a hand against the floor, working through the stonework inch by inch, the kind of search most people don’t have the patience for.
There.
A faint line, almost nothing. A seam where there shouldn’t be one. A trapdoor so well disguised that it disappears unless you know exactly what you’re looking for.
I pull it open and drop down.
A narrow tunnel stretches ahead. It leads into another cellar, larger and older than the current structure by decades, maybe more.
The remains of shelving line the walls, but otherwise, the space is empty.
From there, the passage joins the base of an unused chimney.
I don’t need to climb it to know exactly which section of the roof it leads to. That part lines up on its own.
“Fuck!”
How did I not know this existed? Would Theo? And how the hell did that intruder know?
Whoever came for me understood The Trap better than I did. They knew where to strike and how to vanish before the fire gave them away. This has a history that predates the Bronx mess and Belladonna.
I head back through the east cellar, into The Gallows, and leave The Trap.
Driving into the city, I call my PA. “Sabine, meet me at Avelis.”
She’s more than just an assistant. Sabine threads the separate layers of my life together—the clinic, research, the Game, the parts no one is meant to overlap. Ten years at my side, and she’s pulled me out of danger more than once.
When Avelis first took off, she caught someone tampering with my car during a downtown event. The man claimed he was a mechanic, assuming she’d be an easy mark. She didn’t hesitate. Her reaction gave me the seconds I needed to reach her, and the situation ended before it escalated.
I owe my life to a few people. Even a lone wolf keeps allies.
“Good evening, Mr. Lockwood,” Sabine says when I arrive. She’s impeccable as always, no matter the hour.
I hand her the shoe.
Her brows rise. “Oh, Gianvito Rossi 105. I always wanted a pair.”
“Your last bonus could buy a dozen,” I point out.
She smiles. “What would you like me to do with it?”
“Pack it. I’ll tell you when and who to send it to.”
She nods, slipping the stiletto into a box. “By the way, I heard something about your old friend, McBride.”
The name still sits wrong with me. McBride.
Once my closest friend, the man who helped seed Avelis’s early development.
When the pressure rose, he bailed, leaving me with debt that could have buried the clinic and the cosmetics line in a single sweep.
I trusted him enough that I hadn’t built a failsafe.
The Hunts saved the company and me before the fallout consumed everything.
“What about him?” I say. “What sick stunt did he pull this time? And who did he aim it at?”
“Well, it’s not another one of those fake memorials or holding a mock tribunal,” Sabine says. “Apparently, he was the puppet master behind the Sali warehouse fire last year.”
“He was?”
“Word is he’s angling for a merger with Sali.”
I press my lips together. “Thank you, Sabine. That’s all.” I leave her and step into my consultation room, heading straight to the locked cabinet.
The tibia was mailed to me weeks ago. Was that a warning I didn’t take seriously enough?
I observed the bone again. It was harvested and deliberately chosen. And the note contained letters cut from magazines: EVERY EMPIRE HAS A FRACTURE POINT.
“Dammit!”
McBride knows about the Game. He knows about Wolf.
The only reason he hasn’t made it public is that after everything he destroyed, I’m the one who rescued his business and kept the mobs he owed from tearing him apart.
I reward loyalty, not scumbags like him.
In his case, the reward worked in my favor: his silence.
And—
A pulse catches in my shin. Old pain. People say physical pain mirrors the mind. Tonight, I believe it.
McBride once handed me painkillers during a flare I couldn’t hide. I made up some lies. That presence of mind to conceal my childhood deformity was automatic. But he could have followed the thread and found more than I meant him to.
I pull out my phone.
“Liam,” I say, “pay our friend McBride a visit. Somewhere he can…feel the heat.”
Liam doesn’t ask questions, and Max won’t either.
“We’ll pick you up on the way to the airport,” Liam says. “Where are you?”
“You go ahead,” I tell them. “I need to see Theo first.”