Chapter 5 - The Slip of the Card
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Seven hundred miles north, on the top floor of a glass skyscraper overlooking Boston Harbor, the evening light cast long shadows across Dante Castellano’s mahogany desk.
The office was dead silent save for the clink of ice against crystal—though the scotch in Dante’s glass hadn't been touched in three hours.
For seven and a half months, Dante had lived in a state of cold, functioning madness.
On the polished wood in front of him sat Tessa’s old cell phone—the one she had left on her kitchen counter the night she vanished—alongside a faded Polaroid photograph of her laughing on the beach in Cape Cod last summer, her honey-brown hair blowing across her face while she wore his oversized gray sweatshirt.
Next to the photograph sat three leather-bound intelligence binders compiled by the best private trackers, former NSA hackers, and syndicate street scouts money could buy.
Every single page was a dead end.
"Nothing from the West Coast border checkpoints, Boss," said Nico, Dante’s underboss and head of security, stepping quietly into the office with a fresh folder in his hand. "We ran her social security number, her teaching credentials, her mother’s maiden name, and every facial recognition camera at every Amtrak and Greyhound terminal between here and Montreal. After she climbed down that Marlborough Street fire escape in November, she turned into smoke."
Dante didn't lift his eyes from the Polaroid photograph. His thumb brushed slowly over the edge of the white paper frame.
"People don't turn into smoke, Nico," Dante said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp from months of sleepless nights and barked orders. "She had twelve thousand dollars in cash from that tutoring tin in her kitchen. No car. No credit cards. That means she took a cash bus route south or west where the cameras were outdated, and she’s working off the books under an alias."
"Dante..." Nico hesitated, shifting his weight near the front of the desk as only a man who had known the Don since childhood dared to do. "It’s been nearly eight months. If she thought you were going to kill her after what she saw with Julian in the garage—"
Dante’s eyes snapped up. The sheer, murderous ferocity blazing in those dark pupils made Nico stop mid-sentence and take an involuntary step back.
"Say she’s dead, Nico," Dante whispered softly, rising slowly from his leather chair until his six-foot-four frame towered over the desk, "and I’ll throw you through that window myself. I would know if she stopped breathing in this world. She’s out there. And I will burn all fifty states to the ground until I find out who is hiding her."
Before Nico could reply, the private red encrypted landline on the corner of the desk—connected directly to the syndicate’s data-mining farm in Cambridge—let out a sharp, shrill ring.
Both men froze. That line was programmed to ring for only one thing: a biometric or medical database match on Tessa Collins.
Dante snatched the receiver off the cradle before the second ring could finish. "Speak."
"Boss, we just got a Level-One red flag out of a rural county hospital network in western Virginia," the lead data technician’s voice rattled rapidly over the line. "St. Jude’s Regional Medical Center in Shenandoah County. Twenty minutes ago, an unconscious Jane Doe was brought in by ambulance under the name 'Maya Brooks.' She had no ID on her, so the emergency room nurse opened her purse to look for medical alert cards—and scanned an old prescription allergy bracelet barcode from Massachusetts General Hospital to check her blood type before emergency surgery."
Dante’s hand gripped the black plastic receiver so hard the casing groaned. His heart hammered against his ribs like a caged beast.
"Emergency surgery?" Dante’s voice dropped to a terrifying, breathless roar. "What happened to her?! Is she hurt?!"
"The ER admission code says severe preeclampsia with placental abruption, Boss," the technician replied. "They’re prepping her for an emergency delivery in the maternity ward right now—she’s thirty-four weeks pregnant."
Silence crashed down over the fiftieth-floor office.
Thirty-four weeks.
Seven and a half months since the rainy Thursday night in November when she had stood trembling in that parking garage.
She hadn't just run away from him that night.
May you like
She had been carrying his child under her coat the entire time.
"Get the Gulfstream fueled at Logan in ten minutes," Dante commanded, already sprinting for the private elevator doors as Nico raced behind him. "And call our Virginia crew—I want thirty men locking down every exit of that hospital before I touch the ground!"
