Langston’s face hardened instantly. “What.”
“It’s Arthur Miller.”
The world dropped out beneath Amelia.
“Two men posing as hospital orderlies took him twenty minutes ago.”
Everything after that moved like stormlight.
Phones rang. Cars sped. Men armed themselves. Amelia sat in the back of an armored SUV trying to breathe while Langston turned into something colder than rage. A blocked call came through. Camila’s voice slid into the speaker like perfume poured over poison.
She had Arthur.
She wanted the ledger.
She told Amelia to retrieve it from her old apartment and bring it to Pier Four alone, or Arthur would go into the freezing harbor.
Langston called it what it was. A trap. He wanted to set his own counterattack. Snipers. Surveillance. Backup hidden in cranes and containers.
But Amelia knew Camila’s type. Pride made women like her careless, not blind.
At a red light in an industrial corridor, Amelia pretended she was about to be sick. Langston stepped out with her. When he reached for her shoulder, she whispered, “I’m sorry,” and sprayed pepper spray straight into his eyes.
He roared. Rocco shouted. Amelia jumped behind the wheel and drove.
By the time she reached her old apartment, her hands were shaking so badly she could barely kick the door in. The place smelled like dust, old heating pipes, and every year she had tried to outwork despair. She tore up loose boards in her bedroom. Nothing. She ripped open her father’s chair in the living room. There, taped beneath the seat springs, waited a thick oil-stained envelope.
Inside was the black ledger.
Arthur had spent fifteen years sitting on a live grenade.
Amelia drove to the shipyard with the book on the passenger seat and fear lodged like steel in her throat.
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