Chapter 20 - The Knock at Two A.M.
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Nora stood pressed against the cold steel cabinets, her chest heaving as she looked at the man she had fallen so desperately, irrevocably in love with.
Every memory from the past three months replayed behind her eyes in a brutal new light: Julian sitting at her wobbly kitchen table in Uptown talking to Leo about model airplanes; Julian taking a bullet in the arm on the fire escape; Julian handing her the cream envelope with the house deed and telling her she was free to walk away.
He hadn't been paying a life debt for the night she hid him in the pantry. He had been trying to pay a blood debt for the night his brother tore her life apart seven years ago.
And yet—as she stared into Julian’s tormented gray eyes—she remembered the feel of his heart hammering against her palm in the hospital hallway, and the way he had stepped directly between a submachine gun and her brother without a second of hesitation. The guilt had brought him to her door at two in the morning, yes.
Wait.
Nora’s eyes dropped back to the green glass banker’s lamp on the desk.
"Julian," she said, her voice dropping suddenly as the cold survival instinct in her brain cut through her heartbreak. "When I opened the door upstairs five minutes ago, this lamp was already warm."
Julian frowned, his gaze snapping toward the desk. "I haven't been down in this vault since November. I was going to burn that file the night I gave you the ring, and I couldn't bring myself to destroy the last piece of paper with Matteo’s name on it."
"Then why was the light switch off, the lamp still warm, and this specific folder sitting right in the center of the blotter waiting for me?" Nora whispered.
Julian moved like lightning, lunging across the cellar room to push her behind him while drawing the compact Glock from his waistband. He snatched the cream folder off the desk and flipped to the final page—the sealed Chicago Police Department traffic report.
Pinned to the back of the police report with a fresh silver paperclip was a glossy, high-resolution traffic camera photograph that hadn't been in the file in November.
It showed the intersection of Broadway and Argyle seven years ago in the pouring rain, two seconds before impact. Behind the wheel of the black Cadillac Escalade wasn't a terrified fourteen-year-old boy.
The fourteen-year-old boy was in the passenger seat, reaching frantically for the steering wheel—while the driver who had just bailed out of the moving driver’s door into the dark alley was a man with a familiar jagged scar across his left cheek.
Dario.
And written across the bottom of the photograph in wet black marker was a message written ten minutes ago:
Matteo wanted to go to the police seven years ago, Boss, and he was going to confess to the girl the night Camila’s bomb went off—except it wasn't Camila’s bomb. Keep the girl downstairs. I’m taking the boy on the second floor as insurance until I cross the border.
Nora’s scream tore through the cellar vault. "Leo!"
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Julian was already sprinting up the concrete stairs two at a time, Nora right on his heels as they burst out into the east wing corridor.
The house power had been cut. Outside the tall frosted windows, the blizzard howled through the dark, and somewhere on the second floor above them—just as the antique clock in the hall struck two in the morning—three slow, heavy knocks echoed against a locked mahogany door.
