Ruthless Vow

Chapter Three

The Man at the Window

The man at the door didn't ask my name.

Everyone asked for my name. Banks asked. Hospitals asked. The landlord called before they even opened the door. This man took one look at me and stepped aside.

He already had it. Somebody had called down and told him to expect me, or somebody had told him days ago and he'd been standing there ever since. Either way, I didn't like it.

I walked past him into a hallway with dark wood and low light. A woman waited at the end of it — thin, gray-haired, dressed in black — and she didn't say hello. She turned and walked, and I followed her past four doors. At the fifth one she opened the door and stood back so I would walk in first.

The office was enormous and almost empty. One desk. One lamp. A wall of windows with the city spread out below it, lit up like something that belonged to the man standing in front of it.

He had his back to me.

"Ms. Marchetti," he said.

I hadn't said my name. Not to him. Not to the woman. Not to the man at the door.

"Who are you?"

He turned around. He was younger than I expected — thirty-five, maybe. Tall, dark-haired, dark suit, a face that gave me nothing at all. No interest, no impatience, no warmth. Just still.

"Damian Cross, "Sit down," he said.

"I'll stand."

He didn't argue. He walked to the desk and sat down behind it and left me standing, which was fine with me. I'd spent the whole week sitting across from people who told me no. Standing was a small thing I could keep.

For a moment, though, before he sat, he looked at me the way you look at a door you were told would be locked and found open. It lasted less than a second. Then it was gone and the flat face was back.

"Your sister needs surgery," he said. "One hundred and twenty thousand dollars after insurance. Thirteen days."

My purse strap slid off my shoulder. I caught it on my forearm without looking away from him.

"How do you know that?" I said.

"Anyone who asks my club for money goes through a background check."

"Then why does yours have my sister's surgery date in it?"

He didn't deny it. He watched me the way a man watches a number he's waiting to see come up.

"Before we go further," he said, "answer something for me. Has anyone contacted you this week? Phone or in person?"

The question was so strange that I answered it before I decided to.

"Someone has been calling my sister's hospital for nine days," I said. "Asking about my mother. Which doctors treated her. Which room she was in when she died."

He went still. Different from before. The first stillness had been a pose. This one wasn't.

"Repeat that," he said.

"Nine days. Four calls. He never leaves a name."

For a moment he didn't look like a man who already knew the answer to everything. He looked like a man doing arithmetic in his head.

"That call wasn't mine," he said.

"I didn't say it was."

"You were thinking about it."

I was. He had that right.

"This week has been too neat," he said. "You walked in here at exactly eight o'clock, on exactly the night somebody promised you would. I don't like being handed a script."

Then he opened a drawer, took out a folder, and slid one page across the desk toward me.

Smaller than I expected. A single sheet, folded once, unfolded flat. Blue ink. Handwriting I had never seen in my life.

My name was at the top.

Under my name, two lines.

*She'll call on a Tuesday evening.*

*She'll need $120,000.*

I read it twice. The first time it didn't make sense. The second time it made too much.

"This was left at my front desk nine days ago," he said. "Nobody saw who brought it."

Nine days. My hands had started to shake, so I set the page back down on the desk.

"Why are you showing me this?" I said.

"Because somebody handed me your name and a date and sat back to watch what I did with them." He squared the page with the edge of the folder. "Somebody wants you in a room with me. I'd like to know who."

"So would I."

"Then we agree on one thing."

He looked at me across the desk while he said it. Not flat this time. There was something in his face I couldn't name, and it didn't last. He looked away first, down at the folder, and closed it.

"There's something else," he said.

"What?"

"The note gave me two new pieces of information. The day you'd call. The amount you'd need." He paused. "Everything else on that page, I already knew."

Nothing moved except the understanding, which arrived slowly, the way bad news does.

"What else is on the page?" I said.

"Your name. Mia's name. Your mother's name. Which hospital has her case? Which doctor signed it.?" He said it with no weight at all, like he was reading a grocery list. "None of it was new to me."

"How long have you known all of that?"

He didn't answer right away. He looked at me the way a man looks at a table he's about to turn over, deciding whether he wants the mess.

"I've had a file on your family for six years, Ms. Marchetti."

Six years.

I did the math without meaning to. Six years ago I was twenty. Mia was eleven. Mom was alive. None of this — the hospital, the deadline, the calls, the note — existed yet. None of it.

"Six years," I said. "And you never once picked up a phone."

"No."

"Why not?"

He stood and walked to the window and put his hands in his pockets and looked out at the city.

"I'll answer one question," he said. "Tomorrow night. Eight o'clock. Whatever you want to ask. And after that, you can decide whether you ever want to see this room again."

"One question."

"One."

I opened my mouth to argue and then didn't, because I could see on his face that I'd get nothing more tonight. I turned and walked out.

The woman in black walked me back down the hallway without a word. The man at the front opened the door and didn't look at me as I passed him.

The night air hit me on the steps and I stopped for a second and just breathed. Then I walked to my car at the end of the block, dug my keys out of my purse, and unlocked the door.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I pulled it out. One missed call from a number I didn't recognize, and one voicemail. The call came in at 8:14. I'd been inside at 8:14. My phone had been on silent in my purse the whole time.

I stood beside my car with my keys in my hand and pressed play.

A man's voice. Calm. Not old, not young. Nothing about it I could place.

"Ms. Marchetti. You don't know me, but I know your mother. I've been trying to reach you for nine days." A short pause. "I see you found the club. Good. That saves us time."

I looked up and down the street. Empty. Streetlights. A taxi two blocks down. Nothing.

His voice came back.

"You're standing next to a silver Corolla right now. Don't look around. Get in."

My hand closed around the keys so hard the metal cut into my palm.

"Drive home. Lock your door. Tomorrow, when you go back to that building, ask the man inside one thing for me." Another pause. Longer this time. "Ask him where his father was the night yours disappeared."

The voicemail ended.

I stood on the sidewalk with the phone still against my ear and the streetlight humming above me, and I didn't move for a long time.

Then I got in the car and locked the doors and sat there with my hands on the wheel, shaking, because he'd watched me walk out of that b

uilding. He'd watched me walk down the block. He'd been watching the whole time.

And the question he wanted me to ask was about Damian Cross's father.

Not mine.