Voice notes.

Photos of terrified girls in motel rooms.

A half-deleted recording of Derek talking with Rourke about moving a witness before she could testify.

Enough to bury men far richer than Derek.

‘You should leave now,’ Harper said when Gabriel told her.

‘He won’t stop.

Not with this.’

Gabriel looked at her over his whiskey glass.

‘I wasn’t planning to stop either.’

Derek made the next move.

He arrived at the front gate in plain clothes and a detective’s arrogance, flashing his badge at security and demanding his wife be returned.

Gabriel went down himself.

Rain glossed the iron gate.

Derek stood under an umbrella, handsome in the polished, dangerous way some cruel men were, as if the world kept rewarding them for looking controlled.

‘You’re interfering in a domestic situation,’ Derek said.

Gabriel rested one hand in his coat pocket.

‘There’s nothing domestic about cracked ribs.’

Derek smiled without warmth.

‘Careful, Ashford.

Men in your line of work shouldn’t invite police attention.’

‘And men in your line of work shouldn’t leave evidence lying around.’

The smile slipped.

Only for a second.

But Gabriel saw it.

That was when he knew Derek would not retreat.

Men like that could survive shame.

They could not survive fear.

The trap took forty-eight hours.

Gabriel had no illusions about morality.

He was not suddenly a good man because he wanted one worse man broken.

But he knew one honest federal prosecutor, a woman named Ada Velez, who hated traffickers more than she hated Gabriel.

He sent the copied files anonymously first.

Then he sent her one message: If you want Lawson talking on record, be at Pier 14 Friday at midnight.

Harper insisted on being part of it.

‘He won’t talk if I’m not there,’ she said.

Gabriel hated that she was right.

He outfitted her with a wire so small it sat hidden in the seam of her coat.

His security ringed the dark harbor from a distance.

Federal agents waited farther back, unseen.

Mrs.

Morrison stayed at the house with Noah.

At eleven fifty-eight, Harper stood inside an abandoned warehouse that smelled of salt, rust, and old oil.

She looked terrified.

She also looked furious, and that made her brave in a way fear never could.

Derek walked in two minutes later with a gun tucked under his jacket.

‘I knew you’d come back to me,’ he said.

‘I didn’t come back to you,’ Harper said.

‘I came so you’d finally say it where somebody could hear.’

He laughed.

‘Hear what? That you make men angry? That you never knew when to stop snooping?’

She forced herself not to look toward the shadows where Gabriel was listening.

‘Did you kill that witness in Southie?’ she asked.

Derek’s smile sharpened.

‘I didn’t have to.

Rourke’s people handled her.

I just made sure nobody looked too hard.’

He stepped closer.

‘You should’ve stayed quiet, Harper.

You and the boy could have kept breathing.’

The words were enough.

So was what came next.

Because Derek kept talking.

About girls he moved for cash.

About complaints he buried.

About the joy of watching frightened women beg men who would never believe them.

About Noah, and how easy it would have been to make the child disappear if Harper had pushed him one inch farther.