Chapter 1 - THE EMPTY MORNING
I never told Rhett Valin about my brother. Three years I poured his coffee and left his newspaper folded just so, and never once said the name I was born with. Then my ex-boyfriend put me on the floor of my apartment, and the most feared man in Chicago carried me out like I was something that mattered. I thought that was the worst thing that could happen to me. I was wrong. Because the moment I woke up in his house, the phone in his pocket started ringing — and it was Victor.
The rain had been falling since noon and showed no intention of stopping.
Rhett Valin stood at the window of his forty-third-floor office and watched Chicago dissolve into gray. The city looked smaller in the rain, like a fist unclenching. The lights on Michigan Avenue bled into long amber streaks down the wet glass, and the people below moved fast with their collars up, trying to disappear. He understood that instinct better than most.
His phone had rung eleven times in the last hour. He hadn’t answered once.
“Mr. Valin,” the intercom crackled. “Your three o’clock is still waiting in the—”
“Send them home.”
“Sir, this is the Castellano account. They flew in from—
“I said send them home, Marcus.”
A pause. “Yes, sir.”
He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose and breathed through it. The Castellano account was worth four million a year in construction contracts, some of them legitimate. He didn’t care. He couldn’t make himself care, which was a problem he hadn’t figured out how to name yet.
It was 3:17 in the afternoon, and Isa had not come to work.
That had never happened before. Not once in three years.
Rhett was not a man who noticed the presence of people around him. He moved through rooms and other people adjusted. He spoke and other people listened. He had cultivated that quality deliberately, over years, because in his world invisibility was a weapon and attention was a liability.
But he had noticed Isa. Not in the way he noticed beautiful women — and she was, though she dressed in a way that seemed designed to make you forget it. He noticed her the way you notice a system running smoothly. You only become aware of it when it stops.
She arrived every morning at seven. He knew this because the coffee was always ready by the time he came down at 7:15, always the right temperature, and there was always a folded newspaper on the kitchen counter — even though he had never asked for one, and had never mentioned that he read them. She left every evening at five. The house ran differently after she left. Not badly. The other staff were competent. But differently. Quieter in a way that had nothing to do with noise.
He’d had housekeepers before. Good ones. He had never thought about any of them between seven in the evening and seven in the morning.
He thought about Isa.
He turned from the window and called Marcus back.
“Pull Isa Voss’s home address from HR. Don’t ask why.”
“Already pulled it, sir. I anticipated.”
“You anticipated.”
“You’ve checked your phone four times in the last twenty minutes, sir. I thought it might be relevant.”
Rhett looked at the phone on his desk. He hadn’t been aware he was doing that.
“Text it to me,” he said. “And cancel everything for the rest of the day.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
He was already reaching for his coat.
The address was a walk-up in Pilsen — three stories of red brick that had been old when the neighborhood was still working-class and hadn’t improved with time. The kind of building where the buzzers on the front panel were either broken or relabeled so many times you couldn’t trust any of them. The rain had turned the front steps dark and slick. A grocery bag abandoned on the stoop had gone translucent from the wet.
Rhett stood on the sidewalk for a moment. He’d come alone, which his security detail had not been happy about. He didn’t care. There were situations that required force and situations that required quiet, and he had been doing this long enough to know the difference.
He pressed the buzzer for 2B. Nothing.
He pressed it again and held it for three seconds. Nothing.
The front door was a standard residential lock, the kind that looked more secure than it was. He slid a card from his inner pocket — not a credit card — worked the latch with practiced efficiency, and pushed inside. The lobby smelled like old carpet and cigarettes and someone’s dinner from three floors up. A row of metal mailboxes lined one wall, some with names taped on them, some blank.
He took the stairs. Second floor. The hallway light was working, but barely — one of those energy-saving bulbs that hadn’t fully warmed up and cast everything in a jaundiced yellow.
2B was at the end of the hall.
He raised his hand to knock, and stopped.
The door was open. Not wide open. Just a crack, maybe two inches. The latch not seated.
But in Rhett’s world, a door that should be closed and wasn’t was never a neutral observation. His hand went to the inside of his jacket. The weight of the weapon there was familiar, reassuring in a functional way — the same way a surgeon finds comfort in knowing the instruments are present before the incision.
He pushed the door open with two fingers and stepped inside.
The apartment looked like something had detonated in the middle of it. A side table was on its back. The lamp beside it shattered, the bulb gone dark. A bookshelf had been pulled from the wall, books scattered in a wide fan across the floor. The kitchen was visible from the doorway: a chair overturned, a mug broken, coffee dried in a splatter pattern up the cabinet face that told him it had been thrown some hours ago. A framed photograph of two women in summer dresses lay face-up on the floor, glass cracked across it.
There was a smell in the room he recognized and hated. Iron and copper and something underneath that — something biological, something he associated with moments he did not let himself revisit.
Blood.
It wasn’t on the floor, not in the main space. His eyes moved in a systematic sweep, left to right, high to low, cataloging and eliminating.
Then he heard it. A sound from the hallway beyond the kitchen. Small and wet. A breathing sound.
He moved through the kitchen fast, stepping over the broken mug, and pushed open the door at the far end.
The bedroom.
Isa was on the floor beside the bed, wedged into the gap between the bed frame and the nightstand as if she had crawled there and run out of the energy to go further. She was in the clothes she would have worn to work that morning — dark slacks, a gray blouse, one shoe still on, one shoe missing. Her face was turned away from him, but he could see the line of her shoulder and the way her chest was moving. Shallow. Too shallow, with a catch on every inhale.
He crossed the room in three strides and knelt beside her.
“Isa.”
She flinched at her own name. The flinch moved through her whole body, and it told him she was conscious, which was something — and it also told him she was terrified, which did something to his chest he was not prepared for.
“It’s me.” He kept his voice low and even. “It’s Rhett. You’re okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”
A pause. Then she turned her head.
He had prepared himself, in the two seconds between speaking and her moving, for something bad.
He had not prepared himself for this.
Her left eye was swollen nearly shut. The skin around it had gone a color that moved from deep purple at the socket to sick yellow at the edges — which meant it hadn’t happened in the last hour. Her lower lip was split and had bled down her chin, dried now to a rust-brown line. There was a mark on her jaw that had the precise shape of a knuckle, and another on her throat. And when his gaze moved down, he saw that the sleeve of her blouse had been torn at the shoulder seam.
He had seen violence his whole adult life. He had participated in it. He had ordered it. He had watched men he’d put in rooms not walk out again and felt nothing beyond the cold assessment of whether the outcome was correct.
His hands were shaking.
He pressed them flat against his thighs and made them stop.
“Can you move?” he said.
Her voice, when it came, was a ruin. Something had been done to her throat — not a bruise, something worse, something that had changed the quality of her voice and probably hurt to use.
“How did you—”
“You didn’t come to work.” He said it simply, as if that explained everything. It did. “Can you move?”
She tried to push herself up. The sound she made stopped him from letting her continue. He got his arm under her back and his other arm behind her knees and lifted her slowly, the way you lift something you are afraid of breaking further. She was lighter than he expected. She was also shaking — fine tremors running through her like current. He recognized that kind too. The body in the aftermath, adrenaline burning through what was left of it.
“I’m fine,” she said.
May you like
It was one of the most dishonest things he had ever heard.
“No,” he said. “You’re not.”
