Chapter 9
Three days.
She had been gone for three days and my chain with her.
Three days since Luca had started pulling every camera feed, every transaction record, every digital footprint in a three mile radius of the bar.
Three days and nothing.
I sat behind my desk and looked at the city through the floor length windows. Grey morning. Traffic below moving like it always did — indifferent, continuous, completely unbothered by the fact that somewhere out there a woman was walking around with something that didn't belong to her.
"She paid cash for the taxi," Luca said from behind his screens. Three monitors. No natural light. He seemed to prefer it that way.
"Bar tab was card though. I have a name."
I didn't turn around.
"Then why are you telling me about the taxi?" A pause.
"Elera Carter," he said. "Twenty something. Works at a marketing firm downtown. Clean record. No priors. No connections to anything."
Elera Carter.
I turned the name over in my mind.
Elera.
It suited her somehow. Soft at the edges but with something stubborn underneath. Like the woman herself.
I closed that thought immediately.
She had my chain. That was the only relevant fact. Everything else was irrelevant noise.
"She's not hiding," Luca said, still not looking up from his screens. Blue light across his face, three monitors casting their glow into the dark corner he'd claimed as his own.
"She's just... living. Going to work. Coming home. Grocery store on Tuesdays apparently."
I looked at the ceiling briefly.
"She doesn't know what she has," Romano said from the door.
"Obviously." I leaned back. "If she knew she'd either be trying to sell it or she'd already be on a plane."
I was certain of that much. A woman who left three hundred dollars on a nightstand and tiptoed out wearing a stranger's shirt was not running a calculated theft.
She was running from embarrassment. The chain was somewhere at the bottom of her bag, tangled with her earrings, completely forgotten while she went about her life entirely unaware.
"Address," I said.
Luca read it out.
"She follows the same route every day," he continued. "Leaves at seven. Back by six."
I checked the time. 4:23 pm.
Caught you, Kitten.
I picked up my coat.
"And the chain?" Romano asked from the door. Arms crossed. Expression carefully neutral in the way that meant he had opinions he was choosing not to share.
"She has it," I said, moving toward the door.
That was when Seraphina appeared in the doorway..She had a bowl. Pregnancy snacks and the smug expression of someone who had arrived specifically to cause problems. She had been deploying that particular smile against me since we were children and she'd figured out exactly how effective it was.
"In a hurry?" she asked.
"Yes. Some of us have work that doesn't involve stalking our husbands."
"You look tense, brother."
The smile didn't move. Had she already figured it out? I glanced at Romano. He had the look of a man preparing to be sacrificed and finding the prospect deeply unfair. Not him then. Seraphina just had instincts. Unfortunate, inconvenient instincts.
"You should rest," I said. "With your condition—"
"I'm pregnant, not disabled." The smile sharpened. She hated being made to feel limited. Even by concern.
My phone buzzed. Drago. I looked at the screen for one moment then answered.
"Valerius." The usual gravel. "About our meeting. The eastern territory—"
"Later."
"This is time sensitive. The group I mentioned, three incidents this week alone on the docks—"
"I said later, Drago."
A pause. The kind men like Drago took when they remembered who they were talking to.
"Of course," he said carefully. "Whenever you're ready."
I ended the call. Seraphina was watching me with bright interested eyes over her bowl.
"You never postpone Drago," she said.
"I do when I have other priorities."
"What priorities?" She looked around the office with exaggerated curiosity. "You're just standing here with Romano making his silent suffering face—"
"That's enough," I said.
She smiled. Slow. Devastating.
"Caspian," she said, in the tone that meant she already knew everything and was simply enjoying watching me refuse to confirm it. "What's her name?"
Damn her and her stupid instinct. I let out a deep sigh, pinching the bridge of my nose.
"Find something else to do," I said, and stormed off with a particular destination in mind.
Behind me, I heard her laugh. Celebrating her victory on successfully making mood worse.
I kept walking.
____________________________________
I arrived at the corner of her street at 5:47pm.
Thirteen minutes early. I was always early. Punctuality was a discipline and discipline was the difference between men who controlled things and men who were controlled by them.
I positioned myself near the mouth of the alley between two buildings — close enough to intercept her route, removed enough from the main street that the conversation would have privacy. Clean. Efficient. I would retrieve the chain, show her her place, and be back in my car within ten minutes.
Simple.
The street was busier than I had anticipated.
Evening foot traffic. Office workers pouring out of buildings, heads down, moving fast, the particular collective urgency of people trying to get somewhere that wasn't work.
I stood slightly apart from it, jacket on, and watched the crowd with the detached patience of someone who had learned long ago that stillness was its own kind of power.
Then someone walked into me.
Not brushed past. Not grazed. Walked directly, fully, into my left side with the momentum of a man looking at his phone and operating under the apparent assumption that the pavement ahead of him was empty.
The container in his hand did not survive the impact.
I looked down. Curry.
Dark, oily, spectacularly fragrant curry, distributed across my shirt from collar to waist with the kind of thoroughness that suggested the universe had been planning this specifically.
The man looked up from his phone. Looked at my shirt. Looked at my face.
Then he walked away very quickly without saying anything.
I stood very still. He would face the consequences.
Around me the street continued moving, indifferent, continuous, completely unbothered.
I removed my jacket slowly. Looked at the shirt underneath. The stain had soaked through. The smell was immediate and comprehensive and entirely incompatible with any version of this interaction I had planned.
I folded my jacket over my arm.
Ran a hand through my hair.
Which was when the second person clipped my shoulder from behind, not hard, just enough, and I felt my hair shift from where it had been into something considerably less composed. I turned but the person was already gone, absorbed back into the crowd.
I looked at the alley wall for a moment.
Then I checked the time.
5:58pm.
She would be here in approximately two minutes.
I straightened my collar. Smoothed what could be smoothed.
The shirt was a loss. The smell was a loss.
The overall impression I would be making was significantly different from the one I had arrived intending to make, but the objective remained the same.
Chain. Retrieve. Leave.
I positioned myself at the alley entrance and waited.
At 6:08 I saw her.
She was walking with her head slightly down, bag over one shoulder, earphones in one ear, navigating the thinning crowd with the automatic familiarity of someone who walked this route every day without thinking about it.
She looked tired. The kind of tired that had settled in over days rather than hours.
She hadn't seen me yet.
I stepped forward as she reached the alley. She looked up.
The recognition was slow. A slight frown.
The particular focus of someone trying to place a face they knew from somewhere they couldn't immediately name.
Her eyes moved across my face, dropped briefly to my stained shirt, then back up.
I pulled her into the alley before anyone could make this evening worse, backing her against the nearest surface.
"Give me the chain," I said quietly.
She looked at me, my tattooed arms, my oil stained shirt, my unruly hair. She gulped, a look of a person deciding between life and wealth. She stood still for a while then she gave me her chain.
I looked at it sitting in my palm. Delicate Gold. Worth approximately sixty dollars at a generous estimate.
I looked back up at her.
She was watching me with the careful expression of someone who had handed over their valuables and was hoping that would be the end of it.
"What is this?" I asked.
"Chain. Now please let me go." She said as if it was the most reasonable answer.