Chapter 4 - Fragments of Ash and Sapphire
The penthouse atop the Kane Tower in Tribeca did not feel like a home; it felt like a fortress suspended between the clouds and the Hudson River.
Triple-paned ballistic glass sealed out the city’s roar. Steel reinforced the mahogany-paneled doors, and two armed men stood vigil at the private elevator bank twenty-four hours a day. Inside, the floors were dark walnut, the furniture deep gray leather, and the air smelled faintly of cedarwood and polished brass.
Wren stepped out of the private elevator and stopped dead.
She refused to step onto the Persian rug that stretched across the foyer. To her, the plush, blood-red wool looked like a trap—something too soft, too clean, something that would scream if dirty boots touched it.
“You can walk on it,” Adrian said, stepping out behind her and handing his gloves to Marco. “It won’t bite.”
“It’s too quiet,” she whispered. Her hands were buried deep in the pockets of his coat. She turned in a slow circle, her gaze darting to the corners of the ceiling, checking for exits, checking for shadows. “When it’s this quiet, it means everyone is dead, or someone is waiting to jump.”
“Nobody is jumping here, Wren. You’re sixty stories in the air. The only people who come through that door work for me.”
Marco cleared his throat quietly from the threshold. “Boss. Dr. Evans is in the study. He needs to change your dressings. You’re bleeding through the black wool.”
Adrian glanced down at his side. A dark, damp circle had indeed begun to seep through the silk lining of his waistcoat. The alley ambush had left him with three cracked ribs and a five-inch slash from a serrated blade that had barely missed his spleen. Walking four miles through the slush with Wren had reopened the stitches.
“Let him wait,” Adrian said.
“No,” Wren said abruptly.
Adrian paused, looking down at her.
“You’re bleeding because of me,” she said, her voice small but firm. “You stood in the alley because I pulled you down. If your guts fall out, who keeps the door locked?”
A faint, rare ghost of a smile touched Adrian’s mouth. “Fair point. Come with me.”
The penthouse study was lined with floor-to-ceiling books and maps of the Eastern seaboard. Dr. Evans, an elderly man who had stitched up Kane syndicate soldiers for thirty years without ever filing a police report, looked up over his spectacles as they entered. His eyes flicked to Wren, widened slightly at her clean, haunting appearance, but he asked zero questions. Kane men lived long by seeing everything and speaking nothing.
“Sit, Adrian,” Dr. Evans muttered, snapping on latex gloves. “You look like hell warmed over.”
Adrian stripped off his waistcoat and shirt, revealing a torso mapped with old scars, bullet grazes, and the fresh, jagged wound across his left flank, oozing dark venous blood.
Wren didn't flinch at the sight of the blood. She had lived in alleys where junkies bled out on cardboard; blood was the least frightening thing she knew. What made her freeze was the photograph sitting on the mahogany desk next to Adrian’s open laptop.
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It was an old, black-and-white print, framed in tarnished silver.
In the picture, a sixteen-year-old girl in a pristine white riding habit stood beside a massive black stallion. Her smile was blinding, radiant, entirely untainted by the misery of the world. Her hair fell down her back in rich, lustrous black waves. Standing beside the horse, holding the reins with a scowl that looked identical to the one he wore now, was a twenty-six-year-old Adrian
