Chapter 5: The Name He Wasn't Ready to Say
I gave him until the coffee went cold.
"You know who told her," I said.
"I have a suspicion."
"That's not the same as telling me."
"No." He turned the cup slowly on the table.
"It's not."
"Dominic.
My father is de@d.
My mother sits in a dialysis chair three mornings a week.
I have been delivering food to rich people's houses for years because survival didn't leave me better options.
If you have a name, you say it."
He looked up.
"Marcus Hale," he said.
"He was my father's attorney.
He handled everything — the company restructuring after the fire, the insurance settlements, the paperwork that made the whole thing look like negligence instead of what it was." He paused.
"He's also Vanessa's godfather."
The pieces didn't fall into place slowly.
They dropped all at once.
"He knew about my family," I said.
"He knew about my mother's condition.
He's been tracking us."
"I think so.
Yes."
"Why?
We were never a threat.
My mother never went to the police.
She never said a word to anyone."
"Because someone with something to hide doesn't wait for threats to become real," Dominic said.
"They watch.
They maintain control.
And when something changes — like a delivery driver suddenly becoming a recurring presence in the Moretti household — they act."
"Vanessa wasn't humiliating me for fun."
"She was doing it to make you leave.
To make you angry enough or frightened enough to walk away and never come back."
I sat with that for a moment.
"She knew I'd been coming to the house for seven weeks and she waited until a party with sixty witnesses to do it."
"Because sixty witnesses make it look like you're the problem," he said.
"Not her."
I looked at the photograph still on the table between us.
My father's face.
Smiling.
Fourteen months before someone arranged for him to not come home.
"I want the records you found," I said.
"The operational files."
"Avery—"
"I'm not asking for your permission.
I'm telling you what I need.
You've had those records for six years and done nothing with them.
My father has been de@d for eight.
So either you help me, or I start making noise on my own, and whatever you've been trying to protect falls apart anyway."
He studied me for a long moment.
"If I give you those records, Marcus Hale will know within forty-eight hours.
He has contacts inside the city's legal infrastructure.
He will come at you directly."
"Let him."
"You don't know what that means."
"I caught Vanessa Whitmore's wrist in front of sixty people and she blinked first," I said.
"I'm not afraid of her godfather."
Something moved across his face again.
The same thing I'd seen in the corridor the night before.
He reached into his jacket and this time produced a folded piece of paper — a handwritten address.
"Storage facility in Bridgeport.
Unit 14.
The combination is the last four digits of the year my father incorporated the original company." He slid it across.
"1987."
I took it.
"Why are you helping me?"
"Because I've been sitting on those files for six years telling myself I was waiting for the right moment," he said.
"And last night a woman on her knees in my house caught my fiancée's wrist and looked her in the eye, and I realized the right moment had already passed me by." He paused.
"And because your father deserved better than what my family did to him."
I folded the paper and put it in my pocket.
I stood to leave.
"Avery." His voice stopped me.
"Marcus Hale is not the only problem."
I turned.
"Vanessa," he said carefully.
"She didn't just know about your mother.
She knew about your training.
She mentioned it to me last week — said the delivery girl had a martial arts background.
I didn't think anything of it at the time." He stopped.
"She was preparing.
In case you ever pushed back."
The coffee shop felt smaller suddenly.
"She was going to provoke me," I said.
"And she had a plan for what happened if I reacted."
"Yes."
"What was the plan?"
He looked at the table.
"There were two men at that party who are not guests," he said.
"They work for Marcus.
They were positioned near the service entrance before you arrived."
My hands were very still.
"She wasn't trying to humiliate me into leaving," I said.
"She was trying to provoke me into reacting so they could remove me permanently."
Dominic said nothing.
Which was its own kind of answer.
I walked out of the coffee shop into the cold Wabash air and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, the address in my pocket and my father's face still behind my eyes.
Marcus Hale had been watching my family for eight years.
May you like
Last night, I had given him a reason to stop watching and start moving.
I needed to get to that storage unit before he did.
