Chapter 6 - Maya's Confession
The basement of the Queens safe house was stark, lit by humming fluorescent tubes that cast harsh shadows over concrete walls.
Maya Thorne sat on a metal folding chair, clutching a blood-soaked towel against her left shoulder where a 9mm round had grazed her collarbone. She was twenty-seven, thin, with hollow cheeks and dark circles carved deep into her face. She looked like a ghost of the vibrant girl who had danced at my wedding.
When the heavy steel door opened and I walked in, Maya recoiled, pressing herself back against the wall like a trapped cornered fox.
“Devin...” she choked out, her breath ragged. “Did... did you find them? Are they alive?”
I pulled up a chair and sat down three feet from her. I didn't yell. I didn't reach for my weapon. The quietness of my presence seemed to terrify her more than Dante’s rifle ever could.
“They’re at the penthouse,” I said softly. “Aaron is eating pancakes. Aiden is sleeping in a heated bed with three doctors monitoring his vitals. Victor is sitting beside them, showing them his toy cars.”
Maya burst into tears. The towel slipped from her shoulder, revealing the crude field dressing Dante’s men had applied. She buried her face in her bloodstained hands, her shoulders heaving with deep, racking sobs that seemed to pull from the very bottom of her lungs.
“I’m sorry,” she wept. “Devin, I’m so sorry... I thought you were in on it. I swear to God I thought you knew!”
“Why would you think that, Maya?”
Maya wiped her face with trembling fingers, her teeth chattering from shock. She reached into the pocket of her torn canvas jacket and pulled out a battered, water-damaged leather-bound journal. She held it out to me like an offering.
“After Priya was taken,” Maya whispered, “Marcus Vance called me to his office. He showed me a document signed with your name, witnessed by your lawyers, authorizing the termination of Priya’s life support and releasing her body to Aethelgard Bio-Pharma for 'experimental anatomical disposal.' He had bank records showing fifty million dollars transferred into a shell company in the Cayman Islands under the Mallory crest.”
“A forgery,” I said, my teeth grinding so hard I could taste copper.
“I know that now!” Maya cried. “I didn't know then! I was twenty-two! Evelyn told me you were a mobster who only cared about territory, that you wanted Priya out of the way so you could inherit her father’s shipping lines without contest! I believed them! I hated you! I thought you were a monster!”
“And when did you find out the truth?”
“Three weeks ago,” Maya said, her voice dropping into a haunted hush. “I work as a junior administrative director at Aethelgard. I started noticing discrepancies in the Blackwood Institute’s logistics. Heavy medical shipments going to an offshore facility off the coast of Montauk. I used my mother’s clearance codes to access the security feeds.”
She pointed a trembling finger at the journal in my hands.
“Read it, Devin. Priya kept it. A nurse at the facility smuggled it out for her before they moved her.”
With hands that felt completely disconnected from my body, I opened the leather cover.
Priya’s handwriting. The elegant, looping strokes I had loved for seven years.
*Day 412.*
*The drugs they give me keep my muscles paralyzed, but my mind is clear today. If anyone finds this... my husband Devin Mallory did not do this. Marcus Vance used forged power-of-attorney documents. Devin loves me. Devin is looking for me.*
*Day 890.*
*I heard my babies crying today in Sector 4. Hastings thinks I can't hear him through the glass. He calls them Project A and Project B. They took them from me. If Devin is reading this... my love, don't let them break our boys. Victor is with you. Protect him. Aaron and Aiden have your fire. I can hear it when they scream at the doctors.*
*Day 1,640.*
*Marcus is running out of time. His FDA approval failed. He’s going to liquidate the facility and destroy the evidence. Maya... if you are the one who finds this, run to Devin. He is the only man in this world strong enough to bring us home.*
Tears, hot and blinding, dropped onto the fragile paper, blurring my wife's handwriting.
She was alive.
For five years, while I had stood over a granite tombstone in Queens, my wife had been trapped in a concrete cell, paralyzed, listening to our children scream through reinforced glass, believing with every beat of her broken heart that I would come for her.
I closed the journal with a snap that sounded like a gunshot.
“Where is she, Maya?”
Maya looked up at me, her eyes burning with an intense, desperate light. “The Montauk facility is an abandoned naval testing bunker disguised as an oceanographic research station. Vance is moving her tonight. He knows the boys escaped. He’s liquidating everything. If we don't hit that facility before 6:00 AM... he’s going to sink the transport barge into the Atlantic Trench. He’s going to drown her, Devin.”
I stood up. The grief, the guilt, the five years of phantom pain—it all crystallized into a single, cold, diamond-hard directive.
“Dante,” I said.
My lieutenant stepped out of the shadows, his face an impenetrable wall of lethal intent. “The gunships are fueled at the heliport, Boss. Fifty men. Full tactical gear. Heavy ordinance. We can be over Montauk in twenty-five minutes.”
May you like
“No police,” I said, checking the slide on my custom .45 and chambering a round. “No federal agents. No negotiations. Marcus Vance wanted an underworld king? He’s about to find out what happens when you steal from one.”
***
