pain.

“I am guilty of a hundred things, Mara.

But I did not bring you here to harm you.”

She laughed, but it broke halfway.

“You just let me fall in love with you while standing on the truth.”

He closed his eyes.

The office phone rang.

Both of them looked at it.

One ring.

Two.

Three.

Dominic answered without greeting.

The same soft voice returned, this time through the receiver.

“Elevator B.

Storage level.

Ten minutes.

Bring the ledger, or she learns the rest from us.”

The line went dead.

Mara stared at Dominic.

“The rest?”

He was already moving to the wall safe behind the framed map of the Atlantic route.

His hands entered the code quickly, but not quickly enough to hide the tremor in his thumb.

The safe opened.

Inside lay a black leather ledger, three passports, a pistol, and a small silver bracelet Mara recognized so violently that her knees nearly gave out.

Her father’s bracelet.

She had bought it for his forty-fifth birthday from a street vendor near Battery Park.

It had been cheap silver, engraved with a crooked little anchor because he loved anything that looked like the sea.

He wore it every day.

Dominic turned and saw her face.

“Mara—”

“You had it?”

“I found it with the ledger.”

“You had my father’s bracelet and never told me?”

He reached for it, but she got there first.

Her fingers closed around the cold metal.

On the inside, beneath years of scratches, something had been engraved so faintly that she had never noticed it as a girl.

B-17.

Mara looked up.

“What is Locker B-17?”

Dominic’s face went pale.

Before he could answer, the lights on the entire floor cut out.

The glass office vanished into emergency dusk.

Somewhere beyond the doors, people cried out.

A chair scraped.

A phone hit the floor.

The city remained bright beyond the windows, indifferent and unreachable.

Dominic moved first.

He took Mara’s wrist and pulled her behind the desk just as the smoked-glass door burst inward.

Not shattered.

Opened.

Someone had overridden the lock.

Soren appeared in the doorway, one hand inside his jacket.

“Boss,” he said.

“Stairwell cameras are down.

East corridor too.”

“Take her out through the service route,” Dominic ordered.

Mara tore her wrist free.

“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what B-17 is.”

“Mara, this is not the moment.”

“It became the moment when you put my father’s bracelet in a safe.”

Soren glanced between them, expression unreadable.

In the dim light, his face looked carved from stone.

Dominic’s phone vibrated again.

This time, Mara grabbed it before he could.

A video message filled the screen.

It showed a storage corridor somewhere underground, lit by flickering fluorescent lights.

A man wearing a black coat stood beside a row of old maritime lockers.

His face stayed carefully out of frame.

He held up a key.

Then he held up a photograph of Daniel Ellison.

Mara’s breath stopped.

The message ended after six seconds.

No words.

Only an invitation.

Dominic took the phone from her gently, not because he had the right, but because her hands had begun to shake.

“Locker B-17 is at the old customs storage facility under Pier 6,” he said.

“My father leased half that level through shell