THE MAFIA BOSS HAD FINALLY FOUND A CHANCE FOR PEACE—BUT HIS WIFE WAS ENDURING EXCRUCIATING PAIN IN SILENCE BECAUSE SHE DIDN'T WANT TO DESTROY EVERYTHING HE'D WORKED FOR!

The study phone rang four times before Dominic answered it.

He recognized the voice at once.

“Good evening, Dominic,” Silas Mercer said. “I apologize for calling at this hour.”

“You're never this polite after midnight.”

“Then let me be direct. There appears to be trouble at your property. I can have a private security detail there within fifteen minutes.”

Outside the window, darkness stretched where the sea-wall lamps had been burning moments earlier. Whoever had disabled them knew the order of the electrical circuits.

“That's generous,” Dominic said. “Who told you there was trouble?”

“Leo.”

Dominic looked at the phone's call record. Leo had been inside the house six minutes ago.

“What sort of trouble?”

“A breach. Possibly the Bellinis. I warned you that delaying the Accord would provoke them.”

“There hasn't been a delay.”

“Not yet.”

Dominic heard the threat concealed inside the correction. “I'll see you in the morning, Silas.”

“Before you hang up, take some advice from an old friend. Don't let sentiment make you reckless. Some losses cannot be repaired.”

The line went dead.

Clara stood behind Dominic holding her phone. “That wasn't about the Accord.”

“No.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We get you out of the house.”

Her expression tightened. “Not without Anton.”

Dominic thought of the photographer in the apartment above the stable. He could already hear his men running through the lower corridors. The attackers might be coming through the woods, but the people who had helped them were somewhere within his walls.

“Get your shoes,” he said. “And don't put that glove back on.”

She stared at him.

“I'm not asking you to pretend anymore.”

Clara chose flat boots instead of the beautiful shoes lined beneath her wardrobe. It was a small act of surrender, and also a small relief. She struggled with the laces until Dominic knelt to tie them.

Once, when they were newly married, she had teased him for being able to dismantle a complicated financial arrangement but incapable of fastening the ribbons on a present. He remembered the joke now as his fingers worked the knot.

“Too tight?” he asked.

“No.”

She stroked his hair with her good hand. For a moment the danger outside was held at a distance by something ordinary.

Then glass broke below them.

A guard shouted.

Dominic guided her down the back stairs and into the laundry passage. A narrow service door led to the courtyard behind the kitchens. He knew the route because his mother had once insisted that everyone in the house understand how to escape a fire. He had dismissed her caution as old-fashioned. Tonight it felt like an inheritance.

In the kitchen, Leo met them with a flashlight and a radio.

“Three intruders at the sea wall,” he said. “Maybe four. We found Donnelly's security badge in the gatehouse, but he's gone.”

“Where are the cameras?” Dominic asked.

“Looped. Whoever did this used our own maintenance credentials.”

Leo saw Clara's cast. His gaze stopped there, then moved to Dominic.

“Who did that?” he asked, low and furious.

“I'll tell you when I know whom I can trust.”

Pain crossed Leo's face. He put it away quickly.

“The stable apartment has a secure stairwell,” Leo said. “I'll bring the photographer down myself.”

Dominic hadn't mentioned Anton. “How did you know he was here?”

“Donnelly signed him in. I checked the visitor log after you asked about the guard.”

The explanation was plausible. Dominic hated that he had begun measuring his oldest friend's words that way.

“Bring him to the old boathouse,” Dominic said. “No armed escorts beyond two men I know personally.”

Leo handed him the radio. “Channel four. Say the word if you need me.”

They went out into the storm garden. Rain shone on the stone path. Clara kept one hand pressed against the front of her coat so the injured arm wouldn't swing. Dominic walked close beside her, adjusting his pace to hers rather than pulling her along.

Halfway down the path, the lights in the house flared back on.

Clara stopped. “They want us to think it's over.”

Behind the stable, a small engine started. A white van rolled toward the gates without headlights.

Dominic pressed the radio. “Leo, who's driving the van?”

Static answered.

Then Leo's voice: “Not ours. Keep moving.”

The van accelerated, but instead of taking the drive, it headed straight for the old boathouse. Dominic pushed Clara behind a stone wall as a side door slid open. A man reached out with what looked like a camera bag.

There was no gunfire. There didn't need to be. Dominic had seen enough operations to understand a fast abduction when he saw one.

“Anton,” Clara said.

A second man appeared behind the van, dragging the photographer by his jacket. Anton stumbled, one hand stretched toward the boathouse door.

Dominic made his choice in the space of a heartbeat. He stepped from behind the wall and shouted, “Leave him.”

The man holding Anton froze. The other lifted his arm, and Dominic saw the dark shape of a handgun.

A light blazed from the stable. Leo's voice roared over the night: “Drop it!”

Two of Dominic's guards advanced from opposite sides, their flashlights fixed on the men. The one with the gun ran. The other shoved Anton to the ground and jumped into the van. It skidded away, narrowly missing the stone wall.

Leo did not chase. He reached Anton first, rolled him onto his side, and checked his breathing.

“Stay down,” he ordered. “You're safe.”

Dominic could not ignore the fact that Leo had just saved the photographer. He also could not ignore that the attackers had known exactly where to find him.

Anton was shaken but unhurt. As Leo helped him up, the photographer grabbed Dominic's coat.

“They weren't after me,” he gasped. “They wanted the card.”

“It's safe,” Dominic said.

“Not the photographs. The other card. The one Mercer gave me tonight.”

Dominic felt Clara go still beside him.

“What other card?”

“Mercer said it contained the guest list for the portrait proofs. He told me to deliver it without opening it. I put it in my camera bag.” Anton looked at the departing van. “They took the bag.”

A stolen card could be a trap, a decoy, or a handoff gone wrong. Dominic wasn't about to decide which in a courtyard full of witnesses.

Clara touched his sleeve. “Owen's message. Where we used to hide things.”

“You know where he means?”

“The old lifeboat station behind Harbor House. We hid our father's fishing medals in a rusted biscuit tin beneath the floorboards. Owen said no one would look there because no one knew what the place meant to us.”

“Could be a trap.”

“It could. But Owen used the word 'real.' He was telling me there's a false ledger out there.”

Dominic studied her. A night of being frightened had not taken away her intelligence. In fact, she seemed most herself when he stopped trying to protect her from every decision.

“We won't go alone,” he said.

“We don't bring the whole family, either.”

He nodded. “Agreed.”

Elise Moreno arrived in her dented blue car shortly after two. She had ignored three calls from Dominic's security chief, then driven through the service entrance using a nurse's old access badge. Her hair was escaping its braid and she wore a raincoat over hospital scrubs.

“I heard there was another disaster,” she said when she saw Clara. “And before anyone asks, she is not climbing through windows or getting on a motorcycle.”

Clara almost laughed.

Elise examined the cast, checked Clara's fingers for sensation and swelling, and gave precise instructions about the pain medication. Then she took out an ordinary paper envelope.

“This was left for me at the clinic,” she told them. “Someone pushed it through the mail slot. No return address.”

Inside was a photocopy of a port delivery note. Its heading read MARINER TRUST—HUMANITARIAN DISTRIBUTION. At the bottom, two handwritten initials had been circled in red.

SM.

“That could be Silas Mercer,” Dominic said.

“Or someone wants you to think so,” Elise replied. “Read the quantities.”

Clara scanned the page. “Twelve hundred refrigerated packages,” she murmured. “But Harbor House received forty-eight.”

“Exactly,” Elise said. “And last week I treated a twelve-year-old girl whose insulin supply failed twice. Her mother got it from a supposed charitable shipment.”

Dominic looked at the paper as though it were a weapon laid on the table.

“I knew someone was stealing,” he said. “I didn't know they were poisoning what they left behind.”

“Maybe it's defective stock. Maybe counterfeit,” Elise said. “We need a legitimate lab test. But I can tell you this: someone is using a charity's name to move dangerous medication.”

Dominic thought of the men who had told him Pier Nine was a minor detail. Every agreement began to look different.

At three, the group gathered in the boathouse: Dominic, Clara, Elise, Anton, and Leo, who stood near the door with his gun holstered. Dominic had not intended to include him, but Clara had quietly said that a man who risked himself for Anton deserved to hear at least part of the truth.

Dominic unfolded a harbor chart.

“Tomorrow, I'll walk into the Accord meeting as planned,” he said. “They'll think I know nothing. Meanwhile, we find the ledger.”

Leo looked at the photograph of Clara's cast lying beside the map.

“Tell me who did it,” he asked again.

“Someone wearing Mariner Trust insignia,” Clara answered.

Leo's jaw clenched. “I interviewed their security contractor last month. Silas insisted they were vetted.”

“Did you keep your notes?” Dominic asked.

“Every page.”

“Bring them.”

Leo hesitated, then set his silver lighter on the table. It had a dent at one corner.

“I lost this at the Halcyon,” he said. “I haven't seen it in ten days. If someone showed you a picture of it, I need you to know it wasn't in my pocket.”

Clara stared at the lighter. “How did you know there was a picture?”

“Because Donnelly asked me about it this afternoon. He said he found one exactly like mine in the garage. I thought he was joking.”

He looked at Dominic. “Now I think he was checking whether the lie had worked.”

Dominic picked up the lighter. The initials LN were engraved on the base, just as they had been when he gave it to Leo on his thirtieth birthday.

At last, one suspicion had an answer. It was not an acquittal of everyone in the house, but it was enough to make the next step possible.

“Then we find Donnelly,” Dominic said.

Elise's phone chimed. She read the message and went pale.

“What?” Clara asked.

“The clinic's night nurse has just been told to evacuate. Someone reported a gas leak.”

Elise called the emergency services number herself. There had been no official evacuation order.

Dominic looked around the little boathouse.

“It's a diversion,” he said. “They know where we're going.”