YOU BELONG TO ME,MRS STONE

Chapter 2: The Man Who Knew Everything

Adrian Stone

My phone rang at 9:04 p.m.

I didn't answer calls after eight unless someone was dead, arrested, or trying to destroy something I owned. Tonight, apparently, it was the first one.

"Talk," I said.

"Parking structure on Fifth. One body, male, mid-forties. Two shooters, professional, in and out in under ninety seconds." Marcus didn't waste words. It was why he still had this job. "Feed's coming through now."

The footage loaded on my second monitor while the first still held a supply chain report I had stopped reading an hour earlier. Black and white, grainy, the kind of camera nobody budgeted to replace until something like this happened.

I watched a man die from four different angles in under a minute.

I didn't flinch. I had stopped flinching at things like this a long time ago, somewhere between my father's funeral and the day I decided grief was a luxury tax I couldn't afford to keep paying.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Working on it. Wallet's gone, but facial recognition is running now."

"And the shooters?"

"Clean exit. No plates on the vehicle. Masks the whole time." Marcus paused, the kind of pause he only used when something worse was coming. "There's a witness."

I went still.

"Show me."

The angle shifted. Stairwell camera, third level down, timestamped four seconds before the shot. A woman in her mid-twenties stood frozen at the base of the stairs as though the concrete had swallowed her feet.

She didn't run at first.

That was the part that caught my attention.Most people ran the instant instinct told them to. She stood there a full two seconds too long, watching, before her body finally remembered it was supposed to survive.

Then she moved, fast, sideways instead of back the way she had come, which told me two things. She was smart enough to know a straight retreat got you shot in the back, and she was terrified enough that the smart choice happened on instinct rather than calculation.

"Pull her," I said.

"Facial recognition's running. We should have a name in ten minutes."

It took eight.

Eva Carter. Twenty-five. Kindergarten teacher. She lived four blocks from the parking structure. No criminal record. No political ties. No reason on paper to have been standing in a parking garage at exactly the wrong second of the wrong night.

Her file was thin in the way ordinary lives were thin.

Rent paid on time.Most of her student loans were gone.Her mother had died two years earlier.No father was listed.

A life built entirely out of nothing anyone would ever think to weaponize.

Which was exactly why it was about to be weaponized.

I pulled up a photo from her school's staff page, the kind of headshot nobody took seriously. A forced smile. A cheap lanyard. Yet there was something in her eyes, even in that flat, badly lit picture, that didn't match the rest of her file. Something steadier than it should have been for a woman who spent her days corralling toddlers and her nights grading finger paintings.

I looked at it longer than I intended to.

"Sir." Marcus again

I set the photo aside. Feeling things about a photograph wasn't a habit I intended to start.

"Who's the body?" I asked.

"The preliminary match came back. Daniel Ferris. Financial consultant. Worked for a shell company that traced back through two more shells to Weston Holdings."

There it was.Weston.

Senator Weston's family money had been laundered through consulting fees and campaign infrastructure for the better part of a decade. It was the exact machine I had spent the last eleven months quietly dismantling, one thread at a time.

Ferris hadn't been important enough to be dangerous on his own.He had simply known too much.Which was worse.

Now he was dead, and the only person who had seen it happen was a kindergarten teacher who had no idea what she had walked into.

"They'll run her," I said. "How long?"

Marcus didn't answer immediately, which meant he already knew the odds were bad.

"If they identify her the way we did, hours. Maybe less if they've got someone inside the department pulling the same footage."

I checked my watch.

Every second we spent deciding was another second they spent acting.

Weston's people didn't leave loose ends alive.

I had watched them clean up smaller problems than an eyewitness with a face on camera and a pulse.

A woman like Eva Carter wouldn't be arrested or intimidated into silence.

She'd be found in an alley a week from now, and a coroner who owed someone a favor would rule it an unfortunate coincidence.

I should have felt nothing about that.Six months earlier, I wouldn't have.I felt something anyway.

I looked at the badly lit school photo still glowing on my monitor.

"Where is she now?" I asked.

"Home. Apartment on Larkspur, fourth floor. She ran straight there after the shooting. She never called the police."

Smart.

Or scared enough to make the smart choice by accident again.

"Security on the building?"

"None worth mentioning."

I stood.

The window behind my desk overlooked the city, laid out in a perfect grid of lights.

Somewhere inside that grid, a woman was sitting alone in an apartment with a locked door that wouldn't matter to anyone determined enough to get through it.

I had spent eleven years building something people feared touching.Not because I enjoyed being feared, whatever the board believed, but because fear was the only currency that reliably kept the people I cared about alive.

My name on something was a wall.It had been for years.It was the only wall I trusted.

She didn't know that wall existed yet.She didn't know she needed it.

"Sir?"

I made the decision the way I made every decision that mattered.

Quickly.Without asking anyone's permission.

"Bring her to me," I said. "Before they do."

"Copy that. I'll have a team there within the hour."

"Not a team. You and one other. No uniforms. No vehicles that draw attention. She's already terrified, Marcus. I don't need her believing we're the ones hunting her."

"He kind of is being hunted, sir."

"I'm aware. I'd prefer she not think we're the ones doing it."

He ended the call to make the arrangements.

I remained at the window a moment longer, watching the lights, thinking about a stairwell camera and the two full seconds a woman had stood frozen instead of running, watching something she never should have survived seeing.

Whatever else Eva Carter was, she wasn't the kind of person who broke easily.

Good.

She was going to need that.

Eva Carter

The knock came at 9:52 p.m.Two sharp raps.

Nothing like the frantic pounding I had been expecting ever since the text arrived.

I went still on the floor where I had been sitting for the better part of an hour, my phone clutched so tightly my knuckles ached.

"Ms. Carter."

A man's voice.

"We're not here to hurt you."

That was exactly what someone who wanted to hurt me would say.I didn't move.I barely breathed.

Maybe if I stayed quiet enough, still enough, whoever stood on the other side of the door would decide I wasn't home and leave.

"We know you're in there. We know what you saw tonight."

A pause.

When the voice came again, it was lower and more careful.

"You're in danger, and we're the only people in this city equipped to change that. Please open the door."

My hand found the bookshelf I had dragged in front of the handle.

I pressed my palm against it as though wood and stacked paperbacks could somehow tell me the intentions of the men waiting outside.

I leaned toward the peephole.Through the distorted glass, I could make out two figures.

Dark suits,expensive.Not uniforms and definitely not police.