Chapter 6 - THE WATCHER AT THE GATE
The car sat outside the gate for forty minutes.
Rhett watched it on the monitor with his arms crossed and his jaw set, and he did not send anyone out. That was deliberate. Men who come to a gate and sit are men who want to be seen — men who are making a point, not an attack. Sending guards out to meet them would be answering the point.
So he let it sit. And he watched. And he waited.
At the end of the forty minutes, the car’s headlights came on, and it pulled away slowly down the long drive and turned onto the street and was gone. No phone call. No message. Nothing.
It was the most articulate threat Rhett had received in years.
He went back to the kitchen. Isa was sitting at the island now, a cup of tea going cold in front of her, her hands folded on the counter. She looked up when he came in.
“Was it him?” she said.
“Someone he sent.”
“To do what?”
“To be seen.” Rhett sat down across from her. “It’s a message. I know where she is. I can reach her whenever I want. He’s not going to grab you off the street — that’s not how he works. He wants you to come to him. He wants to make the house feel like a cage until you decide the cage is worse than him.”
Isa was quiet for a moment.
“He’s good at that,” she said. “He’s always been good at that. When we were kids, he never hit me. He just made sure I understood that every door in the house belonged to him.”
Rhett looked at her.
“How did you get out?” he asked. “Seven years ago. If every door belonged to him.”
She wrapped both hands around the cold cup and didn’t drink from it.
“I had help,” she said.
“From who?”
“From a man who worked for my father. Not in the business — a driver. His name was Petar. He’d been with the family since before I was born. He drove me to a bus station in Gary at four in the morning and gave me an envelope with three thousand dollars in it and told me never to come back, and never to write, and never to use the name.” She paused. “I asked him why. He said, because you’re the only one of them who ever said thank you.”
Rhett was quiet.
“Two years later,” Isa said, “I read in a newspaper that a driver for the Draven family had been found in a parking garage in Gary. They called it a robbery. It wasn’t a robbery. Victor never found out that Petar helped me — or if he did, he made sure nobody would know what it was really about. But I knew. I’ve always known.” She looked up at him. “That’s who I’ve been running from, Rhett. A man who kills the people who are kind to me and calls it an accident.”
Rhett sat with that for a long moment.
“Then I understand something now that I didn’t before,” he said.
“What?”
“Why you told me not to kill Tyler Kane.”
She looked at him.
“Because you’ve spent seven years watching what happens when men like your brother decide someone deserves to die,” he said. “And you decided a long time ago that you were never going to be part of that. Not even for a man who earned it.”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“You’re not going to like what I have to do about Victor.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
They sat in the kitchen for a long time after that, neither of them saying much, while the house settled around them and the rain started again on the windows.
The next morning, Damon Cross called before seven.
“Rhett. We have a problem.”
“Say it.”
“Kane. Tyler Kane. He didn’t go to work yesterday. He hasn’t been home. His truck’s been sitting outside McNally’s since Tuesday night.” A pause. “And somebody’s been asking about him. Quiet questions, on the street. Who does Tyler Kane know? Who’s he connected to? Does he have family?”
Rhett’s grip tightened on the phone. “Victor.”
“That’s what I think. Victor found out about Kane — probably the same way he found out about his sister. And he’s asking questions about a man who put hands on her.”
“Which means he’s building a reason.”
“He’s building a story,” Damon said. “The kind where he comes to you and says, my sister was attacked, I only want to protect her, and the man keeping her is standing between her and her family. It’s leverage, Rhett. He doesn’t need Kane. He needs Kane to exist.”
Rhett stood at his office window and looked out at the wet gray city and understood, with a clarity that made his chest cold, that Victor Draven had just found the exact shape of the weapon he had been looking for.
And then he understood something else. Something that had been circling at the edge of his mind since the moment Garrett told him how Victor had found her.
The hospital registration.
The patient system.
May you like
Isa’s name had been entered into a medical database two days ago — and Victor had called him within hours.
Somebody inside that house had told him.
