Chapter 2 - The House on Louisburg Square
The car parked at the curb was not his usual armored Mercedes. It was a low, slate-gray Audi sedan with blacked-out rims and an untraceable municipal plate.
The city of Boston was silent under a thin skin of frozen rain. The streetlights on Cambridge Street blurred into long, yellow needles through the wet windshield. Killian drove with one hand on the steering wheel, his eyes constantly flicking between the rearview mirror and the side alleys, his posture rigid.
I sat with my back pressed into the heated leather seat, his coat wrapped tightly across my chest. My wrist throbbed with a dull, sickening beat, but the pain had moved into the background.
The man driving beside me had killed people.
Everyone who worked in the Ashcroft properties knew the rumors. You did not last three years in the Louisburg Square mansion without learning the architecture of his power. Ashcroft Maritime handled thirty percent of the freight that entered New England through legal channels; the other seventy percent moved through terminals where customs inspectors never worked the midnight shift.
Yet, during my three years, he had been nothing if not a ghost. He took his breakfast at five in the morning: black coffee, two poached eggs, rye toast, never a word spoken. He worked in his private study behind reinforced mahogany doors until noon, left for the waterfront, and returned after midnight. I kept his sheets white, his collars crisp, his books dusted, and his pantry stocked.
We had never shared five consecutive minutes of conversation.
Now, he was navigating the narrow, cobblestone inclines of Beacon Hill, tires crunching over the salt and grit.
"The notebook," he said, breaking the silence as we turned onto Mount Vernon Street. "Tell me exactly what was in it."
"It’s just my household ledger," I said, my voice dry. "I’ve kept one since I started."
"What did you record?"
"Everything." I hesitated. "The grocery shipments. The dry cleaning deliveries. The names of the maintenance contractors who came through the service entrance. The meter numbers. The license plates of the delivery vans."
Killian’s jaw ticked. "Why license plates?"
"Because the city gives commercial tickets on Louisburg Square if trucks idle longer than twenty minutes," I explained, feeling suddenly small. "Mr. Vane told me when I was hired that if the delivery drivers got citations, the estate had to pay them. So I wrote down the plates and the arrival times to prove who arrived late. I was just... doing my job."
The car came to a stop in front of the tall, black iron gates of forty-two Louisburg Square. The gas lamps in the private park flickered against the brick townhouses, casting tall, skeletal shadows across the iron fence.
Killian didn't press the gate remote immediately. He sat in the idling car, looking at the dark windows of his own home.
"Did you log the wine deliveries from the North End?" he asked quietly.
"Yes."
"The ones that arrived on Tuesday mornings?"
"The white unmarked vans. Yes. I signed for them when the basement cellar key was left on my desk."
Killian let out a slow, ragged breath that sounded almost like a curse. "Those weren't wine deliveries, Maeve."
My heart gave a strange, sickening lurch. "They were crates of Tuscan Chianti. They had labels—"
"They had four hundred thousand dollars in bearer bonds and unregistered customs manifests tucked behind the second layer of cardboard," Killian said. He turned to look at me, his eyes dark in the car's interior. "And the only people who knew the arrival times of those vans were me, my head of security, and the man who dispatched them."
The gate swung open with a hydraulic hum. He pulled the Audi into the heated cobblestone courtyard behind the carriage house. The heavy cedar carriage doors closed behind us with a solid, definitive thud, shutting out the city, the snow, and the street.
"Dr. Patel is in the library," Killian said, cutting the engine. "She will set the wrist properly. After that, you are not returning to your flat in South Boston."
"Mr. Ashcroft, my apartment is safe—"
"Your apartment was searched fifteen minutes before I reached St. Brendan's," he said calmly, taking the keys from the ignition.
I froze, one hand gripping the leather edge of his coat. "What?"
"My men checked it on my way to get you. The front door was jimmied with a crowbar. Your mattress was cut open. Your brother's high school yearbooks were torn across the floor. They were looking for duplicates of that ledger."
The blood rushed out of my ears, leaving a high-pitched ringing in its place. "Rowan—"
"Rowan is safe," Killian said, his voice dropping into that quiet, terrifyingly steady cadence. "I have two men outside his room at the pavilion right now. No one enters that corridor without my personal clearance. Do you understand me?"
I looked at him—the broad cut of his shoulders, the dark shadow of stubble along his sharp jaw, the cold certainty in his eyes.
"Why would anyone care about my notes?" I whispered.
Killian opened his door, the cold draft sweeping in for a second before he walked around and opened mine. He offered his hand again. This time, I took it because my knees would have buckled if I hadn't.
May you like
"Because," he said, pulling me gently out of the seat and keeping his arm behind my shoulders as we moved toward the private garden entrance, "someone in my organization has been stealing from the waterfront for eight months. And without knowing it, Maeve, you have been writing down their entire operation in blue ballpoint ink."
***
