CHAPTER 3 Maeve
The sound of the deadbolts sliding into place doesn’t just echo in the concrete foyer. It rattles around inside my ribcage, vibrating against my sternum until I feel physically sick.
Clack. Clack. Whir.
Three separate locking mechanisms. I stare at the heavy steel door, my brain sluggishly trying to calculate the physics of breaking through it. I have a broken umbrella back in Chicago. Here, I have a pair of unlaced sneakers and a flash drive.
I am not breaking out of this house.
"Take your shoes off," Declan says.
I flinch, my attention snapping away from the door. He is already walking down a wide, dimly lit corridor, his broad shoulders shifting under the crisp white fabric of his dress shirt. He doesn’t look back to see if I’m following. He expects compliance the way gravity expects things to fall.
I look down at my feet. The white canvas of my sneakers is soaked through with freezing rain and airplane tarmac sludge. I step out of them, leaving them in a pathetic, messy pile on the pristine dark epoxy floor, and follow him in my damp socks.
I pull his charcoal suit jacket tighter around my chest. The wool is heavy, retaining a trace of his body heat and the sharp, clean scent of cedar and ozone.
I should take it off. I should throw it at the back of his head and demand a phone.
But I am shivering so violently my teeth are clicking together, and the jacket is the only thing keeping my core temperature above freezing.
"Where are we?" I ask, my voice sounding thin and reedy in the massive space.
"I told you. Colorado," he replies, his tone flat.
"Colorado is a state, Declan, not a street address. Are we in Aspen? Denver? A secret villain lair inside an active volcano?"
He stops walking. I almost crash into his back, stopping myself just in time. He turns his head slightly, his dark eyes catching the low light of the hallway.
"You use humor to regulate your nervous system when you feel a loss of control," he observes. It isn't a question. It’s a clinical diagnosis delivered by a man who looks like he dissects human behavior for sport. "It won't work here. The environment is already controlled. By me."
A bitter taste floods the back of my tongue. I hate that he read me that easily. I hate that he is right.
"I use humor because the alternative is throwing up on your very expensive floor," I say, wrapping my arms around my waist. "And considering I haven't eaten anything since a carton of lo mein twelve hours ago, it would mostly be stomach acid and panic."
A muscle in his jaw tightens. He looks at me—really looks at me—taking in the damp hair sticking to my cheek, the oversized jacket, the defensive posture. For a fraction of a second, the cold, calculating machine fractures, and something darker, something fiercely protective, bleeds through.
"Kitchen is this way," he says, turning back around.
He leads me out of the corridor and into the main living area.
The breath I was holding completely stalls in my throat.
The room is massive, an architectural marvel of exposed steel beams, dark wood, and concrete.
But the defining feature is the wall of floor-to-ceiling bulletproof glass that makes up the entire far side of the house.
Outside, the blizzard is a chaotic, blinding wall of white, howling against the thick panes.
We are suspended on the edge of a mountain, completely isolated from the rest of humanity.
It’s beautiful. It’s a gilded, high-tech cage.
"You brought the stray."
I jump, a small, embarrassing sound escaping my throat.
Sitting on a massive, slate-gray sectional sofa in the center of the room is a guy. He looks to be around my age, maybe a little older, wearing a faded vintage band t-shirt, plaid pajama pants, and thick-rimmed glasses. He has a laptop balanced on his knees and a ceramic bowl in his left hand.
He is eating Froot Loops. The loud, obnoxious crunching sound is the most normal thing I have heard in the last five hours.
Declan stops near the edge of the kitchen island, his posture stiffening. "Leo. I thought I told you to prep the servers in the basement."
"I did," Leo says, talking around a mouthful of neon-colored cereal.
He points his spoon at me. "Servers are humming.
Firewalls are up. Cartel traffic is currently being routed through three dummy IPs in Eastern Europe.
And you didn't tell me she was going to look so.
.. small. The cameras add ten pounds, I guess. "
My brain screeches to a halt. The blood drains from my face, pooling somewhere near my damp socks.
"Cameras?" I repeat, the word tasting like ash.
Leo freezes, his spoon halfway to his mouth. He looks at me, then slowly shifts his gaze to Declan. The silence in the room suddenly feels thick enough to choke on.
"Leo," Declan says. His voice doesn't rise in volume, but the temperature in the room plummets. It’s a warning. A lethal, quiet threat.
Leo clears his throat, setting the bowl down on the glass coffee table. "Traffic cameras. You know. When we were tracking the... the hitmen. In Chicago." He offers a smile that is entirely unconvincing. "Hi. I'm Leo. I'm the guy who makes sure the bad guys can't find the IP address of this house."
I look from Leo to Declan. Declan’s expression is a blank, impenetrable mask. He is watching my face, tracking my reaction, waiting to see if I buy the lie.
I don't.
I work in risk assessment. I look for anomalies in data.
The anomaly here is that a private security firm arrived at my apartment exactly three minutes before a cartel hit squad.
The anomaly is that Declan knew my name, knew my boss, and knew the exact amount of money I had uncovered, all without asking me a single question.
"Right," I say slowly, my voice tight. "Traffic cameras."
I decide to let it go. For now. Confronting a lethal man about his surveillance habits while locked in his mountain fortress seems like a terrible strategic move.
I walk toward the kitchen island, putting a heavy slab of black marble between myself and Declan. The kitchen is immaculate. There are no dishes in the sink, no magnets on the stainless-steel refrigerator, no signs that a human being actually lives here.
"Are you hungry?" Leo asks, popping up from the sofa.
He seems eager to change the subject. "We have cereal.
We have frozen pizza. We have... well, mostly things that can survive a nuclear winter, because Mr. GQ over there," he points a thumb at Declan, "only eats organic protein dust and intimidation. "
"I eat actual food, Leo," Declan mutters, walking around the island. He opens a cabinet, pulls out a clean glass, and fills it with water from the tap. He slides it across the marble toward me. "Drink."
I stare at the water. "I had water on the plane."
"You had three ounces of water on the plane, and your hands are still shaking," Declan counters smoothly. "Hydrate, Miss Gallagher."
I want to refuse just to spite him, but my mouth is painfully dry. I pick up the glass, my fingers brushing against the cold condensation, and take a sip.
Leo leans against the counter, studying me with unabashed curiosity. "So, you're the accountant who poked the bear. Gotta say, I respect the hustle. Most people see a forty-million-dollar discrepancy and look the other way. You downloaded it."
I choke on the water. I cough, pounding a fist against my chest, my eyes watering.
Declan steps forward, his hand raising instinctively as if to touch my back, but he forces it down, his fingers curling into a tight fist at his side.
"How do you know I downloaded it?" I ask, my voice raspy.
Leo blinks. "Because you're a forensic auditor. It's your job to secure the data. Plus, you’ve been standing awkwardly favoring your right leg since you walked in here. You have something heavy in your right sweatpant pocket."
I freeze. My hand twitches, stopping just an inch before it can instinctively cover the pocket.
I look at Declan. He isn't looking at my pocket. He is looking directly into my eyes, his dark gaze heavy and knowing.
He knew. He knew the entire time we were in the car, on the plane, and walking into this house. He just let me believe I was hiding something from him.
"Hand it over, Maeve," Declan says quietly.
The illusion of safety shatters. I take a step back, my damp socks slipping slightly on the polished floor.
"No."
Leo winces, taking a slow step backward toward the living room. "Okay, I'm going to go check the... the things. In the basement. Good luck, stray." He disappears down a dark hallway, leaving me entirely alone with the man in the white shirt.
Declan doesn't yell. He doesn't lunge across the island. He simply walks around the marble counter, his movements slow, deliberate, and terrifyingly graceful.
I back up until my spine hits the stainless-steel door of the refrigerator. The cold metal seeps through the heavy wool of the jacket.
"That flash drive contains the encrypted ledger," Declan says, stopping exactly two feet away from me. It’s close enough that I have to tilt my head up to maintain eye contact.
Close enough that the scent of him completely overwhelms my senses.
"It is the only piece of hard evidence linking Richard Evans to the Sinaloa cartel.
It is also the reason two men tried to put a bullet in your head tonight. "
"It's my insurance," I argue, my voice shaking. I hate the tremor. I hate how small I feel standing in his shadow. "If I give it to you, I have nothing. I'm just a liability."
"You are a liability regardless of what is in your pocket," he corrects, his voice a low, dark murmur. "But you are my liability. I do not need your insurance. I need you to surrender the drive so my team can scrub the metadata and find out exactly who else in your firm had access to those files."
"I can do that. I know the encryption keys."
"You are going to sleep," he says.
"I'm not tired."