Luca exhaled slowly.

“If Cassian Voss is alive, and if that waitress is his granddaughter, then your father didn’t just lie about one man. He hid an entire family.”

“There was a debt,” Adrien said.

“A big one.”

“I know.”

At that exact moment, Maeve sat on the edge of her bathtub in Greenpoint with a wet cloth pressed against her cheek and a phone in her hand.

She stared at a number she had not dialed in two years.

Her blouse was ruined. Her cheek hurt. Her hands were steady.

What she could not stop thinking about was Adrien’s face when she whispered her grandfather’s name.

The crack in the glass.

The four seconds.

The way something behind his eyes had recognized the past before his mind had fully caught up.

Her phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

She answered before the second vibration.

“Hello, Maeve.”

“Who is this?”

“A friend of your grandfather’s.”

She stood and moved to the window. The street below looked ordinary. A cab. A dog walker. Orange streetlight on wet pavement.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We don’t have time for that. You said the name tonight. Now people who were comfortable will become uncomfortable. Some of them are dangerous in ways Adrien Vico cannot protect you from, even if he wants to.”

Maeve said nothing.

“My name doesn’t matter,” the man continued. “Your grandfather called me Felix because he could never pronounce my real name. He told me if I ever found his granddaughter in trouble, I was to get her out.”

Maeve sat back down.

“What do I need to do?”

“Tomorrow morning before seven, leave your apartment. Go to the address I send. Tell no one. Not the manager. Not anyone from the restaurant. And not Adrien Vico.”

“He is not my enemy.”

“No,” Felix said. “But he is not yet your ally. There is a difference. The space between those two things is the most dangerous place on earth.”

The call ended.

A message arrived.

Maeve memorized the address, then deleted it.

Forty seconds later, her phone buzzed again.

A different unknown number appeared on the screen for six seconds, then vanished without a call or message.

Somebody else knew where she was.

At 11:53, Adrien sat in a black car outside Maeve’s building and watched the single lit window on the third floor.

He did not get out.

“She positioned herself near the fire exit every Thursday,” he said.

Luca glanced at the building.

“I noticed that in February. I thought she was nervous.”

“She wasn’t nervous.”

“No.”

Adrien looked up at the light.

“She came to the restaurant on purpose. She waited for the right moment.”

“Why tonight?” Luca asked.

Adrien thought of Charlotte throwing the glass.

“Because Charlotte forced the moment.”

Upstairs, Maeve stood in the dark and listened to Adrien’s car drive away.

But another car remained parked outside the reach of the streetlight.

She remembered her grandfather’s voice.

The most important thing, sweetheart, is knowing the difference between a man who watches you to hurt you and a man who watches you to protect you. The posture looks almost the same. But the stillness is different.

The car outside was very still.

At midnight, Adrien sat at his father’s old desk with years of financial records spread in front of him. He found three places where Cassian Voss should have appeared.

All three had been cut out of the paper with a blade.

Not crossed out.

Removed.

His father had gone through thirty years of records and erased one man by hand.

Adrien called his aunt Rosa at 12:31.

Rosa Vico was sixty-eight, widowed twice, feared by men who pretended not to fear women, and currently living in a Carroll Gardens brownstone where she grew tomatoes and acted harmless.

“Adrien,” she said, her voice thick with sleep. “It’s past midnight.”

“I need to ask you something.”

“What happened?”

“Cassian Voss.”

The silence on the line stretched so long Adrien knew the answer before she spoke.

“Where did you hear that name?”

“A woman said it to me tonight. Green eyes. Dark hair. Around thirty. She said her grandfather—”

“Stop,” Rosa said sharply. “Do not say more on the phone.”

“Rosa.”

“Come here tomorrow before anyone else is awake. Do not bring Luca.”

“Luca is loyal.”

“This is older than Luca. Older than you.”

Then, softer, almost afraid, she asked, “Is the woman safe?”

“She has men watching her building.”

“That is not what I asked.”

Adrien looked at the cut holes in his father’s records.

“She knows things she shouldn’t.”

“Unless she was raised to know them,” Rosa said.

The next morning, Maeve woke at 5:14.

She dressed in dark jeans, a sweater, and shoes she could run in. She packed cash, a burner phone, an old envelope, a folded paper, and a key that had no lock she currently had access to.

Then she looked down at the street.

Three cars.

Adrien had added men overnight.

A fourth car sat farther down the block. That one was not his.

Maeve made coffee, drank it standing up, and made a decision.

She typed a message to a number she had memorized but never stored.

I need to speak with him today. Not the manager. Him.