Chapter 6 - THE MAN WHO STOPPED HIMSELF
I made it three blocks before one of Marco’s men caught me.
His hand closed around my arm.
I twisted.
He pulled harder.
Then somebody hit him from the side.
The man crashed into a parked car.
A second attacker charged.
The newcomer stepped forward, blocked him, and drove him backward into a brick wall.
The attacker came again.
This time, he was dropped hard enough that he stayed down.
I knew those movements.
I knew those hands.
Adrian.
He turned toward me.
Rain ran through his dark hair.
There was blood at the corner of his mouth.
For fifteen years, I had run toward that face.
Tonight I stepped back.
He stopped immediately.
That hurt.
It also mattered.
“I told you not to trace me.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then how are you here?”
“Mara triggered the emergency alert in her building.”
I looked at her.
She lifted her phone.
“Divorce lawyer. Paranoia is professional development.”
Adrian almost smiled.
Then his gaze moved over me.
Shoulder.
Hands.
Face.
Checking for injuries without touching.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
One of his men appeared at the end of the alley.
Adrian raised one hand.
“No one comes closer.”
They stopped.
Even now they obeyed him.
I folded my arms.
“I’m not going back to the estate.”
“I know.”
“No locked safehouse.”
“Fine.”
“No twenty men outside the door.”
His jaw tightened.
“Ten.”
“Three.”
“Six.”
“Four.”
“Claire—”
“Four.”
He exhaled.
“Four.”
Mara looked between us.
“That was disturbingly married.”
We moved to a neutral apartment owned by neither Bellandi nor Mara.
Adrian stayed only long enough to tell me what he had found.
Continuity required his token and my voice.
Carlo had built a duress command into the system using the phrase about the blue door.
I remembered immediately.
“You mocked me for that.”
“I was an idiot.”
“That covers several categories tonight.”
He accepted it.
Then he showed me something recovered from one of the attackers.
A security access card.
Not generic.
Executive level.
Issued personally by Nicholas Dane.
Adrian looked exhausted.
“Nicholas has controlled my estate security for eleven years.”
“How much does he know?”
“Everything.”
“About us?”
His expression darkened.
“Probably.”
Meaning Nicholas knew how Adrian and I fought.
How we reconciled.
What routines I kept.
Which gates I trusted.
Maybe even which old love could fracture fifteen years of marriage in one second.
I suddenly understood something.
“Elena didn’t just arrive because she was in danger.”
Adrian nodded slowly.
“She was placed where Marco needed her.”
“To create chaos.”
“Yes.”
“But the kiss wasn’t part of Marco’s plan.”
“No.”
He looked at me.
“That part was mine.”
Again, no excuse.
Before leaving, Adrian placed my wedding ring on the table.
I stared at it.
“I didn’t bring that for you to wear.”
“Then why?”
“Because Marco searched our bedroom after you disappeared.”
My eyes lifted.
“What?”
“He wanted the ring.”
I looked down at the plain platinum band I had worn for fifteen years.
Adrian turned it over.
Inside the engraving, beneath our wedding date, was a microscopic black dot.
A data chip.
Carlo had hidden something inside my ring.
Adrian whispered:
“My father didn’t give us two keys to Continuity.”
May you like
“He gave us three.”
And Marco had known about the third long before either of us did.
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