“Can you hug me for two minutes?”

The alley behind the Hawthorne House smelled of damp brick, old grease, and the metallic tang of the nearby river.

It was 11:45 PM. The dinner rush was over, the kitchen staff had cleared the line, and Daniel Brooks had already locked the front doors after offering Emma a ride home three separate times. She had turned him down. She needed the cold November air to clear her head. She needed to feel the pavement beneath her feet to convince herself she was still anchored to the real world.

She stood near the heavy steel exit door, pulling her dark green wool coat tightly around her chest. Her uniform dress felt thin underneath, her feet aching from seven hours on the hardwood floors.

In her purse, wrapped in a paper napkin, was the receipt from Table Twelve.

Adrian Vale had paid in cash—four hundred-dollar bills left on a three-hundred-dollar check. He hadn't asked for change.

Emma pulled her phone from her pocket and opened her contacts. She stared at her mother’s name for a long time. Mary Lawson.

If she called her now, her mother would know immediately. Mary could hear a shift in Emma's voice from three states away. Ever since Owen died, Mary lived in a perpetual state of quiet panic, keeping the doors double-locked in her small house in Indiana, jumping every time a car backfired in the street.

“If you love your father, you will never say those words again.”

Emma closed her phone.

She walked out of the alley toward Grand Avenue. The city was quiet for a Thursday night. A light mist was falling, turning the streetlights into soft, yellow halos against the damp pavement.

She took three steps before she heard the engine.

It was a black SUV, idling near the curb twenty yards away. Its lights were off, the exhaust rising in thick white plumes into the cold air.

Emma slowed her pace. Her hand reached into her purse, her fingers closing around her keys, positioning the longest silver key between her knuckles the way her father had taught her when she was sixteen.

The driver’s side door opened.

A man stepped out. He wasn't Adrian Vale. He was the silent man who had been sitting near the door at Table Twelve—broad-shouldered, wearing a dark grey coat, his face shadowed by the brim of a flat cap.

"Miss Lawson?"

Emma stopped. She didn't correct him on the name he shouldn't have known. "Yes?"

"Mr. Vale would like a word."

Emma looked past him toward the rear window of the SUV. The glass was heavily tinted, but as she watched, the window slid down three inches.

A pale face appeared in the gap.

"Get in, Emma," Adrian’s voice drifted through the rain. "The street isn't safe for you tonight."

Emma held her ground. "I have an apartment four blocks away. I can walk."

"George Kessler’s men don't care that your apartment is four blocks away," Adrian said. "They care that you looked at his ring. They care that your last name is Lawson."

The breath caught in Emma's throat.

He knew.

He had known the moment she said her father was an engraver.

The broad-shouldered man opened the rear door for her. He didn't touch her, but his position effectively blocked the sidewalk toward Grand Avenue.

Emma looked at the open car door.

She could run. She could scream, drop her purse, and run toward the bright lights of the riverfront hotel two blocks south. But if Kessler’s men were already watching her, running would only speed up whatever had killed her father fifteen years ago.

She walked to the SUV and climbed into the leather interior.

The door shut behind her, sealing out the sound of the rain.

The air inside the vehicle was warm, smelling faintly of leather, cedarwood, and clean linen. Adrian sat on the far side of the bench seat, his coat unbuttoned, his long legs crossed at the knee.

The SUV pulled away from the curb, its headlights flicking on as it turned toward the river.

"Your father was a brave man, Emma," Adrian said quietly, looking out the window as the city lights blurred past. "Foolish, but brave."

Emma held her purse tightly in her lap. "He was a paramedic. He saved people. That wasn't foolish."

"It was foolish when he decided to write down what he saw in that garage," Adrian replied. His voice was devoid of anger, carried by a flat, reflective calm. "My father was shot three times in the chest. I was seventeen years old. I was sitting in the back of his Lincoln, covered in his blood, when your father’s ambulance arrived."

Emma’s hands tightened around her purse straps. "He told me you were shaking."

Adrian turned his head slowly. The ambient light from a passing streetlamp swept across his face, illuminating the sharp bridge of his nose and the deep green of his eyes.

"He told you?" Adrian asked, his eyebrows rising slightly. "I thought your mother burned his notes."

"She burned the page," Emma said, her voice trembling slightly before she caught herself. "She couldn't burn what he said out loud before he died."

Adrian went quiet for a long moment. The SUV crossed the bridge over the river, the tires humming against the wet metal grates.

"What did he tell you?" Adrian asked.

Emma looked at him. "He said you were a boy who looked like he had just watched the sun die. He said you were holding your father’s hand, and you wouldn't let the police touch you until my father sat on the floor next to you."

Adrian’s jaw tightened. A faint muscle twitched beneath his ear. He looked away, back toward the rain-slicked glass of the window.

"Your father gave me two minutes," Adrian said softly. "The police wanted to move me. The paramedics wanted to check me for shock. George Kessler was already trying to search my father's pockets for his ledger. But your father stood between them and me. He put his coat over my shoulders and held me for two minutes while I stopped breathing."

Emma felt a tear slip down her cheek before she could stop it. "And three weeks later, George Kessler killed him."

"Kessler didn't kill him," Adrian said.

Emma froze. "What?"

"Kessler paid a tow truck driver from Cicero forty thousand dollars to clip your father’s rear bumper on I-55," Adrian said, his voice dropping into a register that made the hair on Emma’s arms stand up. "Kessler was afraid your father had seen the ring. He was right. Your father had seen it when George handed him the bloodied coat."

Emma’s breathing turned shallow. "If you knew... why is George Kessler still sitting at your table?"

Adrian turned his head back to her. The green in his eyes was cold now, like sunlight hitting an iceberg.

"Because fifteen years ago, I was seventeen," Adrian said. "Kessler controlled the warehouses. He controlled the docks. He controlled the police lieutenants on my father's payroll. If I had moved against him then, I would have ended up in the river before my father was buried."

"So you let him walk free," Emma said, disgust creeping into her voice. "You let him sit at your right hand while he ate steak and drank bourbon."

"I let him build my empire," Adrian corrected quietly. "I let him collect the money, make the enemies, and sign his name to thirty years of paper trails. And for fifteen years, I watched him like a hawk."

He leaned closer to her, the scent of cedarwood and cold air wrapping around her.

"And tonight, Emma, George Kessler realized I’m finally ready to kill him."

The SUV slowed down, pulling into a private underground garage beneath a high-rise building near Gold Coast. The heavy iron security gate slid down behind them with a loud, metallic clank, shutting out the rest of the city.

The driver turned off the engine.

"Why am I here, Adrian?" Emma asked, her voice small in the quiet cabin.

Adrian looked at her, his expression unreadable.

"Because twenty minutes ago, George Kessler’s men entered your apartment on Ohio Street," Adrian said quietly. "They didn't find you. But they found a photo of your father on your nightstand."

Emma’s heart dropped into her stomach. Her apartment. Her small, quiet space where she kept her father’s old watch and her mother’s letters.

"My mother..." Emma whispered, panic seizing her throat. "Is my mother—"

"Your mother is safe," Adrian said. "I have two men outside her house in Indiana right now. Nobody touches Mary Lawson."

Emma stared at him, tears blurring her vision. "Why are you doing this?"