Chapter 2 - The Dead Man in the Gray Coat
Bee didn't scream when the man stood up.
Fear was a luxury she couldn't afford.
She walked toward the nearest exit, keeping her pace steady as the crowd shifted around her. Behind her, the man in the gray coat followed without hurrying.
He knew she had recognized him.
That was worse than if he had drawn a gun.
Six years earlier, Dominic's older brother, Matteo Rossi, had supposedly died in an explosion outside a warehouse in Cicero. Bee had never met Matteo, but she had organized the financial records for his funeral and remembered the silver serpent ring Dominic had placed inside the coffin.
The ring had belonged to Matteo.
Dominic had told her so himself.
If Matteo was alive, everything she understood about the Rossi family was built on a lie.
Bee slipped through a side door into the station's parking structure. Her shoes slapped against wet concrete. She reached the third level and ducked behind a delivery van just as the elevator doors opened.
Two men stepped out.
One wore a Rossi security jacket.
The other wore the same gray coat.
"Beatrice," the gray-coated man called pleasantly. "You can stop running."
She held her breath.
"We know what you took," he continued. "And we know where you hid it."
Bee's stomach tightened.
Nobody knew about the archive.
Nobody except the person who had helped her create it.
Her former mentor, Arthur Bell, a retired federal investigator who had taught her how to trace criminal money without leaving fingerprints, had disappeared three days earlier.
She had assumed Lorenzo found him.
Now she wondered whether Arthur had betrayed her first.
A phone began ringing inside the delivery van.
Bee froze.
It was her phone.
She had switched it off twenty minutes earlier.
The screen lit up through her coat pocket, displaying a name that made her blood turn cold.
DOMINIC ROSSI.
She answered without speaking.
For three seconds, neither of them said anything.
Then Dominic's voice came through, low and furious.
"Bee, listen carefully. I know I made a mistake."
A gunshot exploded somewhere behind her.
May you like
Dominic's voice sharpened.
"Whatever happens, do not let Matteo take you alive."
