Chapter 3: What Elizabeth Ran From
I stared at that single word on the screen until the bathroom tiles seemed to tilt beneath me.
Liam leaned over and read it.
His jaw tightened.
"Who has that number?"
"Nobody," I said.
"Nobody is supposed to have that name."
"Emma—"
"Don't." My voice came out sharper than I intended.
"Don't call me that right now."
He sat back.
Waited.
I pressed the phone against my chest and tried to breathe.
The smell of coffee from the kitchen felt wrong suddenly, too warm, too ordinary for what was happening in this small tiled room.
"My real name is Elizabeth Hargrove," I said.
"My father was Daniel Hargrove."
Liam's face didn't change.
He already knew the name.
Everyone in certain parts of Chicago knew that name, though not in the way families were supposed to be known.
"Your father worked for the Vitalis," he said carefully.
"He didn't just work for them." I set the phone face-down on the counter.
"He was their head of private security for eleven years.
He knew everything.
Every account, every deal, every arrangement that never made the newspapers."
"And then he d*ed."
"He was kjlled," I said.
"Two years ago.
They ruled it an accident.
A car going off the Lakeshore Drive embankment in February.
Black ice, they said."
Liam said nothing.
The refrigerator hummed distantly from the kitchen.
"I never believed it was an accident," I continued.
"My father had been keeping records.
Private records, separate from anything the Vitali organization knew about.
He told me once, just once, that if anything ever happened to him, I needed to find a man named Carver.
He said Carver would know what to do with what my father had left behind."
"Who is Carver?"
"I don't know.
I've been trying to find out for two years." I finally looked at Liam directly.
"That's why I was at the gala.
Not to cater.
I was looking for someone connected to my father's old network.
Someone who might know where Carver is."
Liam stood up slowly.
He walked to the window above the bathtub and looked out at the grey Chicago morning.
"And instead you found Alessandro Vitali."
"I didn't find him.
He found me."
"Emma." He turned around.
"Elizabeth.
If someone just sent you that message, it means someone in that building that night recognized you.
And they've been waiting six weeks to make contact."
My phone buzzed again.
We both looked at it.
A second message, same unknown number.
*Your father trusted me.
Meet me.
Alone.
Don't tell the Carter boy.*
Liam read it over my shoulder.
His hand came down on the counter.
"You're not going alone."
"It says—"
"I read what it says." His voice was quiet and completely unmovable.
"You're not going alone."
I looked at the message again.
Then at the pregnancy test still half-hidden behind the cabinet.
Then at Liam's face, which had the particular expression it got when he had already decided something and was simply waiting for me to catch up.
My phone buzzed a third time.
*Come to the Millbrook Diner on Halsted.
Tomorrow.
May you like
7am.
Come alone or I disappear and you never find out what your father died trying to protect.*
