Chapter 5 - BLUEBIRD
Brielle stared at the photograph until the edges blurred.
Twelve days earlier.
The date refused to become less impossible no matter how many times she read it.
Mara had been nine when Brielle last saw her.
The woman in the photograph looked twenty.
She had their mother's eyes.
She had Mara's stubborn mouth.
She also had a scar beneath her chin where Mara once split the skin falling from a bicycle behind their apartment building.
Brielle had held a towel against that cut while Elena called a cab.
There were memories grief could distort.
That scar was not one of them.
"It's her."
Dante did not celebrate.
He looked at the words written beneath the photograph.
BRING BRIELLE ALONE.
"Then you're not going alone."
Brielle turned on him.
"You don't get to decide that."
"The people who staged an attack on my mother and daughter, infiltrated my estate, killed their own men, and searched your apartment just gave us a location."
"They gave me a location."
"Exactly."
"If Mara is there, I'm going."
"Yes."
Dante's calm irritated her more than refusal would have.
"Alone."
"No."
"It says alone."
"Criminals are famously strict about written invitations."
Luca coughed into his fist.
Brielle glared at him.
"Something funny?"
"Not even slightly."
His expression suggested otherwise.
Rosa stepped between them.
"Bluebird has three entrances."
Dante looked at her.
"How do you know?"
"Because Enzo took me there once."
"When?"
"After Ashland."
Brielle felt the old anger return.
"Why?"
Rosa rubbed her hands together.
"He thought Elena might have hidden records there."
"Did you find them?"
"No."
"Did you find Mara?"
Rosa lowered her eyes.
"No."
Brielle walked to the broken window and looked down at the street.
She had spent years training herself not to hope.
Hope made a person wait for footsteps that never reached the door.
Hope made birthdays cruel.
Hope made every girl with dark hair on a train platform turn into a wound.
Grief had been terrible, but grief was stable.
This photograph had destroyed that stability in less than a minute.
"When do we go?"
Dante checked his watch.
"After I know what's waiting there."
"Then whoever sent this sees your men first and leaves."
"My people will not approach the building."
"What will they do?"
"Own every camera within six blocks."
Brielle looked at him.
"You can do that?"
"Yes."
"Legally?"
Dante gave her a look.
She almost smiled despite herself.
"Right."
Three hours later, Brielle sat in the back of a delivery van parked two streets from Bluebird School of Music.
A bulletproof vest pressed against her bruised ribs.
She hated it.
Dante had insisted.
She had agreed only after he pointed out that getting shot would make finding Mara significantly harder.
The argument had been irritatingly effective.
Luca sat before three monitors displaying street cameras.
Dante stood behind him with an earpiece in one ear.
"No movement at the east entrance."
Luca changed feeds.
"No movement west."
Brielle stared at the grainy image of the building.
Bluebird had once been painted white.
Now soot and weather covered the brick.
Half the windows were boarded.
A rusted sign hung crooked above double doors.
The same sign in Mara's photograph.
"She stood there."
Dante looked at her.
"Yes."
"Twelve days ago."
"Yes."
"Then maybe she isn't there now."
"Maybe."
Brielle hated his refusal to offer false hope.
She trusted it anyway.
"You're staying in the van."
"No."
"Brielle."
"The message was for me."
"That's why you're staying here until I know the first room is clear."
"Your security man tried to kill us in your kitchen."
Dante's eyes hardened.
"Which is why only Luca and I are going inside."
That answer surprised her.
"No guards?"
"Not until I know which ones belong to me."
Luca looked over his shoulder.
"Comforting."
Dante opened the van door.
"You volunteered."
"Family is a disease."
"You say that every Christmas."
They disappeared into the alley.
Brielle lasted ninety seconds.
Then she removed the earpiece Luca had given her, ignored the instruction to stay put, and slipped out the opposite side of the van.
The alley behind Bluebird smelled like wet brick and garbage.
She found a side door with a broken lock.
Dante's voice came through the earpiece in her pocket.
"Brielle, answer me."
She kept moving.
"I can see the van door open."
She pressed the button.
"Then stop looking at cameras."
A pause.
"I am going to regret not handcuffing you to the seat."
"That sentence would have ended badly for you."
Luca's voice cut in.
"Please save the flirting for a building that isn't possibly wired with explosives."
Brielle stopped.
"Explosives?"
"Figure of speech."
"You're terrible at comfort."
"I hear that often."
She entered a hallway lined with faded blue paint.
Dust covered the floor except for a narrow line of footprints.
Recent.
Small.
Brielle's pulse quickened.
"I have prints."
Dante answered immediately.
"Where?"
"South hall."
"Stay there."
She followed them.
"Brielle."
"I heard you."
"That has never once meant you listened."
The footprints ended at a practice room.
A piano sat beneath a sheet in the center.
One chair faced it.
On the chair was a red coat.
Brielle stopped breathing.
She knew it from the photograph.
"I found the coat."
Dante's voice changed.
"Do not touch it."
Brielle stepped closer.
A phone rested on the seat beneath the coat.
Its screen lit automatically.
A video began.
Mara appeared.
Older.
Alive.
Moving.
Brielle's knees nearly failed.
Mara sat against a gray wall, wearing the red coat.
There was a bruise along her cheek.
She looked directly into the camera.
"Bri."
Brielle covered her mouth.
Nobody had called her that since Ashland.
"If you found this, then they finally decided to use me."
Mara glanced toward someone off camera.
"I need you to listen to everything before you do something stupid."
Brielle laughed through a sob.
That was exactly how Mara used to speak.
"The Morettis didn't take me from the apartment."
Brielle froze.
"But one of them knows who did."
Footsteps sounded behind Brielle.
Dante entered the room with his weapon lowered.
He saw Mara on the screen.
Neither of them spoke.
Mara continued.
"Mom found a list of names connected to Bellweather."
"The list wasn't just people being protected."
"It was people being sold."
"New identities, addresses, schools, foster placements, everything."
Mara's jaw tightened.
"Somebody was turning protection into inventory."
Dante's face went hard.
"Who?"
As if answering him, Mara looked directly into the camera.
"If Dante Moretti is with you, ask him what happened to his wife."
Brielle glanced at him.
Mara continued.
"Then ask him why he never told the police Celeste called a man named Nico twelve minutes before she died."
Dante went completely still.
Brielle felt the room tilt in a new direction.
"Nico?"
Dante did not answer.
Nico was the name of the man investigating the dead attackers.
The man Luca had said found the access card.
The man Dante apparently still trusted enough to manage security after the estate breach.
Mara's face moved closer to the camera.
"Do not trust the person who gives you the easiest answer."
"And Bri, if he tells you I'm dead, make him prove it this time."
The video ended.
The phone screen went black.
Brielle turned slowly toward Dante.
"You knew Nico spoke to Celeste."
Dante's face revealed nothing.
"Yes."
"And you didn't tell me."
"I didn't know it was connected to Ashland."
"You promised no more protected history."
"I promised you the truth."
"Then start giving it before my dead sister has to send me videos."
Dante stepped closer.
"Nico was Celeste's security liaison."
"She called him constantly."
"The last call was not unusual."
"Then why didn't you tell police?"
"Because Nico said she asked him to keep me away from a meeting."
Brielle stared at him.
"What meeting?"
"He claimed he didn't know."
"And you believed him?"
"At the time."
A metallic click sounded above them.
Dante's head lifted.
"Down."
He threw Brielle behind the piano.
The ceiling erupted.
Glass and plaster fell around them as an automatic weapon fired through the skylight.
Dante covered Brielle with his body.
Luca shouted through the earpiece.
"Roof shooter."
More gunfire answered from outside.
The piano strings screamed as bullets tore through the wood.
Brielle saw the red coat slide from the chair.
Something hard hit the floor beneath it.
A small brass key.
She reached for it.
Dante grabbed her wrist.
"Leave it."
"Mara put it there."
"And whoever is shooting knows that."
The gunfire stopped.
Silence fell too fast.
Luca's voice returned.
"Shooter's moving north."
Dante pulled Brielle to her feet.
"We're leaving."
She snatched the key anyway.
A black number had been engraved into the brass.
3179.
Their childhood code.
Brielle closed her fingers around it.
Then the phone on the chair lit again.
A new text message appeared.
YOU BROUGHT HIM.
A second message followed.
May you like
NOW MARA PAYS FOR IT.
