Chapter One #2
The rain had mostly stopped, leaving the museum district polished with reflected streetlight.
Beyond the renovated waterfront, Crownport Harbor spread dark beneath a low ceiling of clouds, the air carrying the mixed smells of salt, wet stone, diesel, and cold metal from the working port farther north.
Crownport had spent two decades converting old warehouses into restaurants, condominiums, galleries, and boutique hotels, but the city had never managed to erase the industry beneath the redevelopment.
Container cranes rose against the cloudy sky in the distance, lights moved slowly over the water, and somewhere beyond the museum district a ship horn sounded low enough that Isolde felt the vibration through the pavement beneath her boots.
She had taken several steps from the entrance when something made her slow.
Across the street, beneath a sycamore tree dripping rain onto the curb, a dark sedan sat with its headlights off.
There was nothing remarkable about a car parked near a museum after nine at night.
Someone could be waiting for an employee.
A driver could be checking directions. One of the nearby apartments might belong to whoever owned it.
The windshield reflected the museum lights well enough that Isolde couldn't tell whether anyone sat inside.
Still, she became conscious of the keys already threaded between her fingers.
She hated that.
Isolde didn't believe in intuition as some supernatural warning system.
Usually the mind simply recognized details before the conscious brain bothered explaining them—movement in reflected glass, an unfamiliar sound, a person standing where nobody had been a moment earlier.
Tonight she had spent too long worrying about Corwin, and apparently her nervous system had decided a parked luxury sedan deserved its own criminal investigation.
She walked to her hatchback faster than usual without allowing herself to run. Running from a parked car would have been ridiculous. She unlocked her vehicle before reaching it, slid inside, and locked the doors immediately.
For several seconds she sat behind the wheel watching the sedan through the rearview mirror.
It didn't move.
“Fine,” she muttered, starting the engine. “I'm officially paranoid.”
She pulled away from the curb.
The sedan remained parked.
Five minutes later, it was three cars behind her.
Isolde's hands tightened around the steering wheel.
She changed lanes after the next intersection, keeping her speed steady. The sedan changed lanes eventually, although not quickly enough to prove anything. At the next light she took a right she normally wouldn't have, then watched the mirror until the sedan continued straight.
Relief loosened something between her shoulders.
“Excellent,” she murmured. “Very rational.”
She circled toward home again, irritated with herself now, until she turned onto Mercer Street and saw the same dark shape half a block behind her.
The irritation vanished.
Maybe there were two similar cars in Crownport. Maybe she'd looped back into the same traffic.
She took the next left.
The sedan followed.
Her phone came out of her coat pocket at the next red light.
She laid it against her thigh, thumb hovering over the emergency call screen.
A car had been outside the museum. It had followed her, disappeared when she changed course, then reappeared near her apartment.
She no longer cared whether explaining that to a dispatcher made her sound paranoid.
She wanted somewhere bright first. A twenty-four-hour pharmacy sat several blocks away on Carrow Avenue. Employees, customers, cameras. She turned toward it.
She never reached the intersection.
A black SUV pulled from a side street directly into her path.
Isolde hit the brakes hard enough for the seat belt to lock across her chest, stopping less than a car length from its rear door. Before she had time to process what had happened, another vehicle slid in behind her.
For one suspended moment, the street became unnaturally still.
Then the SUV's rear doors opened.
Two men stepped into the wet street.
Every reassuring explanation Isolde had manufactured since leaving the museum disappeared at once.
She threw the car into reverse, but the vehicle behind her blocked the lane. One of the men from the SUV moved toward the driver's side while the other stayed nearer the hood, his attention moving over the buildings and intersections rather than toward her.
That frightened her more than anything else.
They weren't improvising.
Isolde leaned on the horn.
The sound tore through the quiet street.
“Stay in the car,” the man approaching her window called, raising one hand as if the situation could still be discussed reasonably.
“Go fuck yourself.”
She grabbed her phone and hit 911.
A hand struck the driver's window, hard enough to make her flinch away. The man outside didn't look angry. He looked focused, dressed in an ordinary dark jacket, broad enough through the shoulders to make fighting him through a pane of glass an obviously bad plan.
The call connected.
“911, what's your emergency?”
“I've been blocked in on Mercer near Carrow. There are men outside my car and I think they're trying to—”
The passenger door opened.
Isolde froze.
She had locked it.
A third man leaned inside and reached across the center console. She pulled the phone away instinctively, but he caught her wrist and took it from her before she could twist free.
“What the hell are you doing?”
He ended the call.
Isolde lunged after the phone. His fingers closed around her wrist again.
“Don't.”
She drove the heel of her opposite hand toward his face.
He jerked back with a curse, losing his grip.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Get away from me.”
“Isolde.”
The voice came from outside the driver's door.
It wasn't loud, but everyone else's reaction made its authority obvious. The man at the passenger side stopped reaching for her. The one near the hood turned slightly. Even the man she'd nearly hit shifted his attention away from Isolde.
She followed their gaze.
Another man stood several feet from the car.
He was tall without being enormous, dressed in a charcoal overcoat over a dark suit, his hair neat despite the damp wind moving between the buildings.
He wore no mask. None of them did, but with him the absence seemed deliberate rather than careless.
He possessed the stillness of someone who did not expect a situation to become uncontrollable simply because someone else was resisting him.
His gaze went first to the man beside her passenger door.
“Let her go.”
The man stepped back immediately.
Isolde pulled her arm against her body and shifted farther into the driver's seat.
The stranger approached the open driver's door but didn't reach inside. “Get out of the car.”
“No.”
His eyes remained on hers. “Isolde.”
“You knowing my name doesn't improve this.”
“We need to talk.”
“Then you could've called me.”
“That wasn't going to be useful.”
“Neither is surrounding my car in the street.”
His gaze moved briefly toward the phone still in his man's hand. “Probably not.”
The calmness of the response sent anger through her more cleanly than fear.
“Who are you?”
“Taddeo Malfatti.”
The name meant nothing.
Apparently he could tell.
“You haven't heard of me,” he said.
“Should I have?”
“No.”
“Great. Then we're making progress. Move your cars.”
Taddeo didn't.
Only then did Isolde start noticing the smaller details her fear had initially flattened: the expensive watch visible beneath one cuff, the cut of his coat, the way the others waited for him rather than merely standing beside him. He wasn't security.
The security belonged to him.
“Where is Corwin?” he asked.
The question emptied her mind.
“What?”
“Your brother. Where is he?”
“I know who Corwin is.” She wrapped both hands around the steering wheel because they needed somewhere to go. “Why are you asking me where he is?”
“When did you last speak to him?”
“You don't get to ask me questions until you explain what the hell is happening.”
“When, Isolde?”
She hated how reasonable he made the question sound.
“Four days ago. Maybe five.”
Taddeo watched her face closely enough that she became aware of every change she was trying not to show.
“You haven't heard from him since?”
“No.”
“Has he contacted you another way?”
“No.” Fear pushed beneath the anger now, heavier because she could no longer direct it entirely at the men around her. “What happened to my brother?”
“Corwin took something that belongs to my family.”
Isolde stared at him. “You have the wrong person.”
“I don't.”
“My brother doesn't steal things.”
“He did this time.”
“You don't know him.”
“I know enough.”
“No, apparently you know some completely different person with the same name.” She leaned toward the open doorway. “Where is he?”
“We don't know.”
The answer landed harder than anything else he'd said.
“You don't know where he is.”
“No.”
“Is he alive?”
“As far as we know.”
There was no comfort in that. It was the kind of careful answer people gave when they understood precisely how much they couldn't promise.
Isolde looked around at the vehicles boxing her in, the men positioned at different angles, the phone no longer in her possession, and the stranger who knew her name and enough about her movements to intercept her on the route home from work.
Corwin wasn't simply ignoring her.
“What did he take?”
“Money.”
“How much?”
“We'll discuss it somewhere else.”
“No, we'll discuss it here.”
“Not for long.”
“Then talk faster.”
For the first time, something close to reluctant amusement passed across Taddeo's face before disappearing. It didn't make him less frightening. If anything, the fact that he could find anything about this situation mildly entertaining made the distance between their realities feel wider.
He opened the driver's door fully.
Isolde reached blindly toward the center console and closed her hand around a metal pen.
Taddeo looked at it.
“Don't.”
“Take another step.”