Chapter Three: Radio Silence
1020 Words
The call disconnected with a click that felt too clean, too deliberate, and Damian Cross had spent eleven years learning to trust the difference between a dropped signal and a silence someone had chosen for you.
This was the second kind.
He was in the car before he'd fully decided to be, phone pressed to his ear, dialing the private line for Kaine Holdings' front desk instead of her cell. It rang four times before a clipped, professional voice answered.
"Kaine Holdings, how may I direct your call?"
"This is Damian Cross. I need to reach Serena Kaine immediately. It's urgent."
A pause too long for a simple hold. "Mr. Cross, I'm not able to confirm Miss Kaine's location at this time."
"That's not what I asked."
"I understand, sir. But I've been instructed"
"By whom?" The car pulled hard around a corner, and Damian gripped the door handle without registering that he'd done it. "Instructed by whom, exactly?"
The line went quiet in a way that told him everything the woman on the other end wasn't allowed to say out loud.
He hung up and called someone else a name buried three contacts deep, a man who owed him a favor from a deal in Singapore that had gone very right for one of them and very badly for the other, and who happened to have eyes inside half the private security firms in Geneva.
"Marcus. I need to know if Serena Kaine's security detail has checked in in the last hour."
A pause, keys clicking somewhere on the other end. "Give me two minutes."
Damian used the two minutes to stare out the window at a city he suddenly didn't trust every building a possible vantage point, every car a possible tail, every one of the careful, comfortable assumptions he'd built his adult life on suddenly feeling thin enough to see through.
He thought of her voice in the hallway. Warnings imply I care whether you listen.
He thought, with a coldness that surprised even him, that if something had happened to her before Thursday, before he'd had the chance to find out whether that crack in her composure in the elevator meant what he'd let himself hope it meant, he was going to take apart whoever was responsible piece by piece, and he was not going to feel calm about it.
Marcus came back on the line. "Her last confirmed location was her office, forty minutes ago. Security checked in on schedule. Nothing since."
"That's not like her."
"No," Marcus agreed slowly. "It's not."
Serena was, in fact, not being held anywhere, drugged, or dragged into the back of an unmarked car a fact she would have found almost funny, if she'd had the bandwidth for humor in the moment.
She was standing in her own private office, door locked, blinds drawn, staring at a second phone she kept in her safe for exactly this kind of situation a phone with no contacts, no history, and no connection to anything Kaine Holdings' official security detail could trace.
On its screen: a message that had arrived four minutes before her call with Damian cut off.
Unknown: Careful who you tell. The last De Luca who talked too much about family business didn't get to finish the conversation.
Her hands were steady. They were always steady it was one of the few things she trusted about herself completely. But her mind was moving fast, cataloguing the message the way she'd catalog a hostile balance sheet, looking for the seams.
De Luca.
Not Kaine. De Luca the name buried under the one she'd built her legitimate empire on, the name that belonged to the parts of her father's business that didn't appear in any public filing, the name almost no one outside a very small, very dangerous circle had any reason to know.
Whoever had sent this message knew exactly who she really was underneath the CEO. And they'd sent it four minutes after she'd asked Damian Cross to say a name out loud.
She had cut off her own call to him. Not because anything had physically stopped her because for the first time in five years of running two empires simultaneously, she genuinely didn't know which direction the threat was coming from, and until she did, she wasn't willing to hand anyone, even a man whose voice did something inconvenient to her pulse, a single piece of information that might get either of them killed faster.
Her real phone, the one Damian had been calling, sat dark and silent on her desk exactly where she'd left it, powered off.
She picked up the burner instead and typed a single line to the only person she trusted completely with what she was about to do.
Serena: Someone knows about De Luca. I need everything we have on the Voss family attorney by tonight. And I need to know if my father ever did business with Damian Cross's uncle.
The reply came back in under a minute, from a contact saved only as a single letter.
mR: He did. More than business. There's a file. You were never supposed to see it.
Serena's stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with fear for herself.
Serena: Why wasn't I supposed to see it?
R: Because it's about your mother. And because Damian Cross's uncle isn't the one who arranged your parents' marriage, Serena.
R: Damian's father is.
She read it twice. Then, a third time, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less impossible.
Outside her office door, she heard footsteps fast, familiar, unmistakably not her assistant's coming down the hallway with the particular urgency of a man who'd stopped caring whether he was being subtle.
She barely had time to power the burner phone off and lock it back in the safe before the door handle turned.
It was locked. It held for exactly one second before she heard his voice on the other side, low, controlled, and edged with something she'd never once heard in it during the summit.
"Serena. Open the door. Now."
- Writer
