Salt in the Wound

CHAPTER TEN: The Warning

Wren’s car wouldn’t start on a Thursday morning, which in itself was nothing, the battery was four years old, the mechanic said, completely unremarkable, nothing sinister about a dead battery.

What was remarkable was the folded note tucked under her wiper, no envelope, block capitals in blue ballpoint:

ASK YOUR NURSE FRIENDS WHAT HAPPENS TO PEOPLE WHO GO LOOKING FOR THINGS THAT WERE PROPERLY BURIED.

She didn’t tell Julian. Not that day. She told Priya instead, over the nurses’ station at 3 a.m., her voice pitched low under the hum of monitors.

“You need to go to the police,” Priya said, appalled, already reaching for her phone.

“I am the police, basically. Cho’s already on it.” Wren pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I just don’t know if telling Julian makes him more careful, or makes him do something reckless that gets him killed for real this time.”

“So you’re protecting the billionaire,” Priya said, not unkindly, “by keeping him in the dark, about a threat aimed at you, made by people who’ve maybe already murdered his wife.”

Put that way, it sounded exactly as stupid as it was.

She told him that night. He went white, then very quiet, then made three phone calls in succession to a security firm, to Cho, and to Danny, whom he’d never called before in his life, just to hear Danny’s voice confirm he was fine.

Danny, on the other end of that call, sitting on his boat slip in the dark with Marcus’s business card still tucked behind his sobriety chip, said he was fine.

He did not mention the card.

He told himself, again, that it was just a stone.

Julian’s security firm swept Wren’s apartment the next morning, quiet and professional, two men in plain clothes who found nothing and said so with the particular flat calm of people trained not to alarm civilians unnecessarily. They installed a camera by her door anyway, discreet, disguised as a smoke detector, and left a card with a number Julian made her promise to call before she called anyone else, including him, if anything ever felt wrong.

“You realize this is insane,” Wren said, watching one of them test the camera’s night vision from her own hallway. “Three months ago my biggest security concern was whether my building’s front door actually locked.”

“Three months ago you hadn’t pulled a Voss out of a river,” Julian said, and it wasn’t a joke, not really, though he said it like one. “I know what I’m asking you to accept, Wren. A camera in your hallway. A driver who isn’t really a driver. A life where you have to think about whether a note under your windshield wiper is a prank or a message from someone who might have killed my wife. I would understand if this is the moment you decide it’s too much.”

“It’s not the moment,” Wren said, and meant it, though some small, honest part of her noted, filed away, the way she filed away every uncomfortable vital sign in a patient she wasn’t ready to lose, that it might be, someday, if the notes kept coming, if the danger kept climbing instead of receding. For now she stayed. For now, staying still felt like the only thing that made any sense at all.