Chapter 3 - The Price of a Secret
“Talk,” I said, pulling a heavy wooden chair away from the corner of the room and setting it directly in front of the narrow cot. I sat down, resting my elbows on my knees, locking my gaze onto hers. “You have five minutes before I stop being polite, Miss Murphy. Start with how a woman living in a condemned basement in Dorchester ended up with my brother’s son on the exact night he was murdered.”
Maeve shifted slightly, settling Noah more comfortably against her shoulder as he finished the bottle. She patted his back with practiced gentleness until the baby let out a soft, milky burp, his eyelids drooping with sudden exhaustion. She pulled the flannel blanket up around his small shoulders, her movements deliberate and tender.
Only when Noah was completely settled did she look back at me.
“I was working the night shift at St. Jude’s Community Clinic on North Washington Street,” she began, her voice low and even. “It was raining—pouring just like tonight. Around eleven-thirty, right when the news broke about the crash on Hanover Street, the back emergency door rattled.”
I didn't interrupt. I listened to the cadence of her words, measuring every pause for deception.
“I went out to check the alley,” Maeve continued. “I expected a junkie looking for painkillers or some drunk bleeding from a bar fight. Instead, there was a woman standing under the overhang. She was drenched to the skin, bleeding from a gash on her temple, and clutching a bundle wrapped in a soaked wool jacket.”
“Elena,” I murmured, the name tasting like ash in my mouth.
“She didn't give me her name,” Maeve said, shaking her head. “She couldn't. She was barely conscious. She shoved the bundle into my arms so hard I almost dropped him. She looked at me with these wide, terrified eyes—the eyes of someone who knew she was already dead.”
Maeve’s hands tightened slightly around the baby.
“‘Take him,’ she whispered to me. ‘Take my boy. They’re coming for us. If they find him, he dies with us. Hide him, Maeve. Please... hide my baby.’”
I stared at her. “She knew you?”
“We worked together for two months two years ago at a community soup kitchen down by the docks before I took the clinic job,” Maeve explained. “We weren't close friends, but she remembered my name. She knew I lived alone, that I didn't have family in the city, and that I wouldn't sell out a child for a payday.”
“And you didn't call the police?” Ethan interjected from the doorway, his voice sharp with suspicion. “You didn't call the hospitals? You just took a murdered woman’s baby and disappeared into a rat hole in Dorchester?”
Maeve snapped her head toward Ethan, her green eyes flashing with sudden, incandescent fury.
“Call the police?” she hissed, careful not to disturb the sleeping infant. “With what phone? And tell them what—that a dying woman dropped a billionaire’s heir into my lap while half the police department in Boston is on your family’s payroll? Are you insane? Within two hours, word would have leaked to the streets. If the men who hit Michael and Elena found out where Noah was, they would have kicked my door in and slit his throat in his crib just to tie up loose ends!”
She leaned forward, her face inches from mine, ignoring the danger of provoking a man who could ruin her life with a single phone call.
“I protected him,” she whispered fiercely. “For ninety-three days, I bought formula with my grocery money, I sat up with him when he had colic, I wiped his nose, and I kept him safe while you spent three months smashing up the city looking for blood instead of looking for facts.”
The silence that followed her accusation was absolute.
Ethan opened his mouth to retort, but a single raised hand from me stopped him cold.
I sat back in the wooden chair, processing her words. Every instinct I possessed—honed through years of corporate warfare and syndicate management—told me when a person was lying. Their heart rate spikes, their micro-expressions shift, their breathing stutters.
Maeve Murphy’s pulse point at the base of her throat was beating fast, but her eyes never wavered. She believed every single word she was saying because she had lived it.
“If Elena gave him to you,” I said slowly, “she must have told you something else. People don't hand their only child to a former acquaintance in an alley without a reason. Who was she running from, Maeve?”
Maeve hesitated. For the first time, her absolute composure cracked. A flicker of genuine, bone-deep terror crossed her face.
“She didn't name names,” Maeve whispered, looking down at Noah’s sleeping face. “She didn't have time. But she gave me something else before she collapsed.”
My body went completely rigid. “What?”
Maeve reached down with one hand, sliding her fingers into the deep pocket of her oversized gray sweater. She pulled out a small, folded piece of heavy cardstock paper, water-stained and crumpled at the edges, and held it out toward me.
I took it from her fingers, careful not to brush her skin.
I unfolded the paper under the harsh yellow light of the hanging bulb.
It was a business card. Heavy cream-colored stock, embossed with a gold crest that made my blood run instantly cold.
The crest of the Sterling Corporation.
May you like
And beneath it, handwritten in Elena’s hurried, panicked handwriting, was a single address in the Financial District, a string of alphanumeric codes, and three words:
It’s coming from inside.
