Chapter 4 - Pier Nineteen
I did not remember Adrien.
That was the first thing I told him.
I said it twice because once did not feel strong enough.
"I don't remember you."
He stood across the safe room from me with both hands loose at his sides.
"I know."
"You carried me out of a burning warehouse and somehow forgot to mention that?"
"I did not know it was you until tonight."
"But Marcus knew."
"Apparently."
"And the woman who may be my mother knew."
"Apparently."
"Everyone knows things about my life except me."
My voice cracked on the final word.
I hated that.
Adrien took a step forward and stopped when I flinched.
He noticed.
Of course he noticed.
He stepped back again.
"You deserve answers."
"Then give me one without making me drag it out of you."
For several seconds, he said nothing.
Then he reached into his inside pocket and removed an old silver lighter.
There was a dent in one corner.
A black mark ran along the side.
He placed it on the table between us.
"I was at Pier Nineteen because my father sent me to bring Evelyn Mercer to him."
"Why?"
"He believed she had evidence that one of his senior people was betraying the family."
"Who?"
"She never got the chance to tell me."
He looked at the lighter.
"By the time I arrived, the warehouse was already burning."
I saw it then.
Not a full memory.
A flash.
Orange light.
Smoke rolling along a ceiling.
A man's arm around me.
Metal cold against my palm.
My stomach clenched.
I reached for the lighter.
The moment my fingers touched it, the room vanished.
I was twelve again.
Coughing.
Crying without sound because smoke had stolen my voice.
A young man carried me through a doorway while something exploded behind us.
His face was streaked with soot.
Blood ran from his forehead.
He kept saying the same words.
"Look at me."
"Do not close your eyes."
"Look at me."
I dropped the lighter.
It struck the table with a metallic crack.
Adrien moved toward me.
I raised one hand.
"Don't."
He stopped.
My breathing came too fast.
"I remember your voice."
His expression changed.
For the first time, the control slipped completely.
Pain crossed his face.
"I wondered if you would."
"What happened after you carried me out?"
He looked toward Marco.
"Leave us."
Marco hesitated.
"Adrien."
"Now."
The door closed behind him.
Adrien waited until we were alone.
"There were ambulances outside."
"Real ones?"
"I thought so."
"You thought so?"
"A woman in a medic jacket took you from me."
Something cold moved through my chest.
"What woman?"
"I never saw her clearly."
"Was it Evelyn?"
"I don't know."
"What happened next?"
"Someone fired from across the street."
He touched the scar near his hairline that I had not noticed before.
"I went down."
"And me?"
"Gone by the time I woke up."
"You looked for me?"
Adrien gave me a look so sharp it almost felt like an accusation.
"For two years."
I stared at him.
"Why?"
His answer came without hesitation.
"Because I handed a terrified child to someone I had not verified."
His voice dropped.
"And three days later, I was told she had died in the hospital."
The room went silent.
"Who told you?"
"My father."
"Did you see a body?"
"No."
"A death certificate?"
"Yes."
"Mine?"
"The name on it was Lena Hart."
A strange numbness spread through me.
"So someone killed me on paper."
"Yes."
"And then let me keep living under the same name."
Adrien's eyes narrowed slightly.
I saw the moment the contradiction reached him too.
"That makes no sense," he said.
"Unless the point wasn't to hide me from the whole world."
He looked at me.
"Only from me."
The sentence hung between us.
Find the girl before Viscari learns she survived.
The writing on the back of the photograph suddenly felt much older than the paper.
Maybe it had never been about hiding me from police, government records, or anyone else.
Maybe it had been about making sure one specific man believed I was dead.
Adrien picked up the lighter.
"We are going to Pier Nineteen."
I laughed in disbelief.
"I can barely walk."
"Then I will bring what we need here."
"No."
He studied me.
"No?"
"If there is something at that warehouse connected to me, I am going."
"Someone just tried to put a bullet through your head."
"Someone just tried to put a bullet through my head while I was inside your safe room."
I held his gaze.
"Standing still doesn't appear to be safer."
He did not like it.
I could see that clearly.
But after a long moment, he nodded.
"You do exactly what I say if something goes wrong."
"That sounds dangerously close to Marcus."
Adrien's face hardened.
"Never compare me to him."
The words were quiet.
Not offended.
Wounded.
I immediately regretted it.
But he was already turning away.
We left The Velvet Crown through an underground garage twenty minutes later.
I wore borrowed clothes, flat shoes, and a dark coat that belonged to someone much taller than me.
Three black SUVs moved through the rain with no lights inside.
Marco sat in the front seat.
Adrien sat beside me in the back.
No one spoke until the skyline disappeared behind old industrial buildings.
Pier Nineteen had been abandoned for years.
The warehouse was a black skeleton behind a chain-link fence.
Before we crossed the gate, Adrien stopped and handed me a small flashlight.
His fingers brushed mine.
The contact triggered another flash of memory.
A different hand around mine.
Larger.
Soot-darkened.
Pulling me through smoke.
I dropped the flashlight.
It bounced once on wet pavement.
Adrien caught my elbow.
"What did you see?"
I could not answer immediately.
The past came without sequence.
A door marked with a red stripe.
Someone shouting my mother's name.
A man's body on the concrete floor.
Shoes.
Black leather shoes with one lace untied.
A gold watch beside an outstretched hand.
I bent forward, suddenly nauseated.
Adrien moved in front of me so the guards could not see my face.
"You don't have to go inside."
I looked up at him.
"Did anyone give you that choice when you were twenty-one?"
His expression changed.
"No."
"Then maybe that is why I need one now."
He waited.
I picked up the flashlight myself.
"I am going in."
We crossed the fence.
Each step toward the warehouse tightened something behind my ribs.
I noticed details memory had stored without permission.
The slant of the loading ramp.
The shape of a broken upper window.
A rusted hook hanging near the side entrance.
I had seen all of them before.
Fifteen years had changed the building, but not enough to fool the part of me that had once believed I would die inside it.
Near the entrance, I stopped again.
There were scratches on the brick at shoulder height.
Four vertical lines and one crossing them.
A child's tally marks.
My fingers went cold.
"I made those."
Marco looked at me.
"You remember doing it?"
"No."
I touched the marks.
"I remember why."
Adrien waited.
"My mother told me if I got lost, count five things I could touch."
I swallowed.
"I must have been trying not to panic."
Adrien looked at the tally marks for a long moment.
Then he entered the warehouse first.
One wall had collapsed toward the river.
The rest still carried smoke scars from a fire fifteen years old.
I stood beneath the rain and felt memory press against the back of my skull.
"This place should have been demolished," Marco said.
Adrien looked at him.
"My father bought the property after the fire."
"Why keep it?"
"I asked him once."
"What did he say?"
Adrien stared at the building.
"Some graves are safer when people can see where they are."
That sentence stayed with me as we entered.
Our flashlights moved over rusted beams and broken concrete.
The air smelled like river water and old ash.
A section of floor near the back had been replaced more recently than everything around it.
I noticed because the concrete was smoother.
"There."
Adrien crouched.
Marco tapped the surface.
Hollow.
Two guards pried up a rectangular slab.
Beneath it was a metal box.
My pulse quickened.
The lock had already been broken.
Recently.
Adrien opened the lid.
Empty.
Marco cursed under his breath.
I stared at a clean rectangle in the dust where something had rested for years.
"We're late."
Adrien touched the inside edge.
"Not by much."
His fingers came away wet with fresh oil.
A sound echoed behind us.
One metallic click.
Everyone turned.
A guard named Tomas stood ten feet away with his gun pointed directly at Adrien.
Marco raised his weapon.
Tomas moved faster.
"Don't."
His voice shook.
"I don't want to kill anyone else."
Adrien stared at him.
"Then lower the gun."
"You don't understand."
"I understand you have a weapon pointed at me."
Tomas's eyes moved to me.
Fear filled them.
"She was never supposed to come back here."
My stomach turned.
"Who took what was in the box?"
He swallowed.
"I did."
"For who?"
Tomas shook his head.
"They have my daughter."
Marco's face changed.
"Who?"
Tomas opened his mouth.
A shot exploded from somewhere above us.
His body jerked.
He fell before he could speak.
Adrien grabbed me and pulled me behind a concrete pillar.
Gunfire erupted from the rafters.
Marco and the guards returned fire.
Glass shattered somewhere overhead.
I pressed my back against the pillar, fighting for breath.
Tomas lay only a few feet away.
His eyes were open.
Blood spread beneath him.
Something silver protruded from his fist.
I crawled toward him before Adrien could stop me.
"Lena!"
I reached Tomas and forced his fingers open.
A small key lay in his palm.
A paper tag was attached to it.
One word had been written in blue ink.
ORPHEUS.
Another shot struck the floor inches from my hand.
Adrien dragged me backward.
"Are you trying to get killed?"
"He had this."
I held up the key.
Adrien stared at the tag.
Marco shouted from across the warehouse.
"They're moving!"
Footsteps thundered overhead.
Then came the roar of an engine outside.
By the time the guards reached the loading dock, the shooters were gone.
Again.
Only this time, they had left Tomas dead behind them.
Marco knelt beside the body.
"He worked for us nine years."
Adrien's face was unreadable.
"Find his daughter."
"Already trying."
I looked down at the key.
There was a number engraved along the edge.
417.
I had seen it before.
I knew that before I knew where.
Then I remembered the photograph.
The old wooden fence behind twelve-year-old me.
Four numbers had been painted on the mailbox.
9417.
The first digit was almost hidden by my shoulder.
I stared at the key.
"This belonged to my mother."
Adrien turned.
"How do you know?"
"Because she taught me a game when I was little."
The memory returned piece by piece.
Evelyn drawing numbers on scraps of paper.
Telling me to remove the first digit whenever I was afraid.
"The first number is always the lie," she used to say.
I looked at the engraved 417.
Then at the word ORPHEUS.
"She wanted me to find whatever this opens."
Adrien looked toward the black river beyond the broken wall.
"Then somebody else knows that too."
My phone buzzed inside my coat.
A text message from Marcus.
Only five words.
May you like
DO NOT OPEN BOX 417.
