Chapter 1 - THE NAME ON THE BACK OF THE CARD
“Donovan.”
Roman Gallow said the name once, and the five men at the poker table stopped moving.
Donovan kept his fingers around Paige’s injured wrist. His thumb dug into the compression bandage, turning the pain into a white, blinding pulse that traveled almost to her shoulder. She could smell the Scotch on his breath. She could see the reflection of the chandelier in his watery eyes. What she could not understand was why he continued to hold her when everybody else in the room had gone still.
“Let her go,” Roman said.
Donovan offered a smile that looked painful to maintain. “We were joking.”
“No,” Paige said. “We weren’t.”
Roman looked at her, and something unreadable crossed his face. Then he looked back at Donovan.
“You heard her.”
Donovan released her so abruptly that she stumbled into the edge of the wet bar. Luca caught the tray before it fell. Paige tucked her right arm against her stomach, trying not to show how badly it shook.
“Sit down,” Roman told Donovan.
“I am sitting.”
“Then stay there.”
It was a small exchange. Nobody shouted. Nobody drew a weapon. Somehow that made it worse. The other players were studying their chips with exaggerated concentration. Donovan’s face had begun to redden beneath his expensive tan.
Roman pushed his chair away from the table. “Luca, take Paige somewhere quiet. Get ice. Call Dr. Bell. Tell her I want that wrist examined tonight.”
“I don’t need your doctor,” Paige said immediately.
Roman paused. “Then choose one yourself.”
“The emergency department will charge me more than the suit.”
“That isn’t a reason to avoid treatment.”
“It’s the reason people actually avoid treatment.”
For a moment, the air tightened. Luca looked at her with the astonishment of a man watching somebody argue with an oncoming train. Roman merely nodded.
“The examination is on me. No deductions. No hidden agreement. Luca will give you that in writing.”
Paige had heard too many offers that became debts later. She held his gaze. “And if I say no?”
“Then Luca drives you home.”
She wanted to dislike that answer. It would have been easier.
Luca led her down a long hallway to a sitting room with a view of the dark ocean. Wind pushed rain against the glass. There was a couch, an antique chessboard, a fireplace that had not been lit, and a small brass plaque naming a Gallow family scholarship recipient. Paige stood beside the couch because sitting felt too much like accepting hospitality.
Luca returned with an ice pack wrapped in a clean towel and a printed statement saying Roman Gallow would pay the charges for an injury aggravated during work at his residence. Paige read every line before accepting it.
“You always read paperwork?” Luca asked.
“When I can.”
“Most people see his signature and stop.”
“Most people don’t have my bank account.”
Luca almost smiled. “Fair point.”
He had flattened his nose long ago, Paige guessed, and had learned to make his expression hard to read. But he handled the ice gently, leaving it on the table rather than pressing it against her skin.
“I can hold it myself,” she said.
“Wasn’t going to argue.”
Through the doorway she heard a chair scrape, then Donovan’s raised voice.
“You brought an outsider into a private room!”
“I brought a server into a room where people wanted drinks,” Roman answered.
“You don’t even know her name.”
“I know enough to see when somebody’s hurting her.”
Silence followed. Then a door closed.
Paige pressed the ice against her wrist and tried to steady her breathing. She should have taken the bus home. She should never have come to the estate. But the restaurant manager had made it clear that refusing Roman’s invitation would cost her job, and she could not afford another week without wages.
The doctor arrived twenty minutes later. Dr. Simone Bell was in her fifties and carried a plain canvas medical bag instead of the theatrical leather case Paige expected. She examined the bruising, tested movement carefully, and stopped immediately when Paige winced.
“Possible tendon injury, aggravated by compression,” she said. “I can’t diagnose the extent without imaging. You need urgent assessment tomorrow, sooner if you lose sensation or movement. And absolutely no lifting trays tonight.”
“I have a shift tomorrow.”
“Then your employer needs to make accommodations.”
Paige laughed once. “You haven’t met Arthur.”
“Perhaps I should.”
Dr. Bell gave Paige instructions, a removable splint, and a referral. She also gave her a direct number for the clinic, telling her to call if the swelling changed. The kindness felt almost embarrassing. Paige had become accustomed to apologizing before describing pain.
After the doctor left, Roman appeared alone. His sleeves were still rolled to his forearms, and there was a pale line where a watch had been removed.
“Donovan is gone,” he said.
“Did you make him leave?”
“He wanted to leave.”
“Funny. He looked comfortable until I asked him to let go.”
Roman accepted the rebuke. He pulled a chair near the unlit fireplace, leaving several feet between them.
“I owe you an apology,” he said.
She glanced at him. “For what? The injury or that ridiculous arrangement about the suit?”
“Both. I told you to work a debt you never agreed to. I had no right.”
Paige stared. She had expected another calculation, perhaps a lecture about gratitude. Not this.
“You can go now,” he added. “Luca will pay you for tonight and arrange transportation. If Arthur threatens your job, tell him to put it in writing.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“Yes,” Roman replied. “It is.”
His honesty unsettled her more than a threat would have.
He placed an envelope on the coffee table. It held cash for her work, far more than her normal hourly wage, and a receipt stating that the payment was wages, not a loan. Paige counted the money twice.
“Why do you want everything documented?” she asked.
“Because people have lied about what I asked them to do.”
“People have lied about what I agreed to do.”
They looked at each other for a moment. Outside, a wave struck the cliffs and broke apart in the darkness.
Roman stood to leave. As he reached the doorway, something pale slipped from the inside fold of his jacket. A business card landed face down beside the chessboard. Paige saw a handwritten notation across its back.
HART — FAMILY RELEASE / 09-B.
Her fingers went cold.
She knew those words. They had appeared on a letter sent to her mother after her father died, a letter that claimed the family had accepted a final settlement and forfeited any right to challenge the findings of a port investigation. Her mother had burned the letter in a kitchen sink, weeping while she did it.
Paige looked up. “Where did you get that?”
Roman followed her gaze. He picked up the card and turned it over. The front belonged to Donovan Caine, principal of Caine Maritime Advisory. The notation on the back was in blue ink.
“It fell from the folder Donovan brought,” Roman said. “He’s been pressing me to approve an old liability release.”
Paige stood, forgetting her wrist. “Daniel Hart was my father.”
Roman’s expression changed so completely that she wished she had said nothing.
Five years earlier, an explosive device had destroyed a convoy vehicle on the Harbor East access road. Roman’s father and two brothers had died. Newspapers blamed a failure in the port’s security systems. A maintenance technician, Daniel Hart, had been named in the inquiry, accused of bypassing the traffic barrier that should have delayed the vehicle.
Daniel Hart had died before he could testify at the final hearing.
“He didn’t do it,” Paige said.
Roman went very still. “I didn’t say he did.”
“You didn’t have to. Your family’s lawyers called him negligent. Your company sued his estate. We lost everything.”
Roman looked at the card again.
“What would Donovan gain,” Paige asked, “from writing my father’s name on the back of his card?”
He did not answer immediately. Then he reached for his phone.
“Luca,” he said when the line connected. “Nobody destroys anything from tonight’s game. Not a napkin. Not a visitor record. And get me the original Harbor East file.”
Paige shook her head. “No. You don’t get to turn my family into one more private investigation.”
“Then tell me what you want.”
“The same thing I wanted five years ago. Someone to read what my father actually wrote.”
Roman glanced down at the card, then back at her injured hand.
“Bring it,” he said. “I’ll read every word.”
She did not believe him. Not yet. But when Luca drove her home that night, the card’s blue notation seemed to burn behind her eyes.
At two seventeen in the morning, her phone rang. The caller ID showed an unknown number.
She let it go to voicemail.
A man spoke in a voice she had heard less than an hour earlier.
“Miss Hart,” Donovan Caine said, without any drunken slur. “Your father should have taught you what happens when people open old files.”
Then the message ended.
Paige listened twice, staring at the locked apartment door.
For five years she had believed Daniel Hart’s story was finished because nobody powerful wanted to hear it.
Now somebody powerful was afraid she might tell it.
May you like
And that was different.
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