Chapter 6 - Crossed Lines
Forty-eight hours later, the trap snapped shut.
Mitchell Vance had not come with sirens and warrants. He was too corrupt for that, and too cowardly. He knew that if he filed an official police report claiming the head of the Rossi family had kidnapped a waitress, Internal Affairs and the state attorney would ask questions he couldn't afford to answer.
Instead, Vance had gone into the gutter.
At 11:30 PM on a freezing Monday night, Harper stood by the window of the penthouse study. Below, the Gold Coast streets were nearly empty, slick with black ice beneath the amber streetlamps.
In the center of the study, Gabriel stood behind an antique partners desk, listening to a speakerphone.
"He took the bait, Gabriel," the voice of a man named Lucian—one of Gabriel's lieutenants on the south side—crackled over the line. "Vance met with Viktor Petrov at an abandoned meatpacking warehouse on 47th Street. Vance offered Viktor a deal: he provides the CPD patrol routes for the West Loop corridor for the next six months, and Petrov provides six Russian heavies with clean, untraceable weapons to hit your private convoy on Lake Shore Drive."
Gabriel leaned back in his leather chair, a glass of neat Scotch resting between his fingers. "And Viktor agreed?"
"Viktor thinks Vance is a useful idiot," Lucian replied with a dark laugh. "Viktor doesn't know that we bought Petrov’s right-hand man three years ago. We have the entire conversation recorded on high-definition audio and video. Every payoff amount. Every badge number Vance promised to leverage. Every target."
"Good," Gabriel said. "Send the unedited files directly to Special Agent Miller at the FBI field office on Dearborn. Mark it priority delivery from an anonymous whistleblower. Tell him if he wants the biggest public corruption bust in Illinois history, he needs to have fifty federal marshals staged outside the 47th Street warehouse at midnight."
"Understood, boss. What about the street team?"
"Let Vance assemble his men," Gabriel said, his eyes narrowing into cold slits. "Let him think the hit is going down. I want him holding an unregistered weapon with the serial numbers ground off when the marshals breach the perimeter."
Gabriel ended the call.
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Harper turned around from the window, her hands trembling inside the oversized pockets of Gabriel's cardigan. "You're... you're letting the FBI take him?"
Gabriel looked up at her. "Does that disappoint you?"
Harper hesitated. "I... I thought you were going to kill him."
"Killing him is easy," Gabriel said, rising from his desk and walking toward her. He stopped two feet away, looking down into her pale, conflicted face. "A bullet behind the ear in an alleyway costs five hundred dollars and twenty minutes of cleanup. But death is an escape, Harper. Death is quick."
He reached out, his hand hovering near her jaw before resting gently against the side of her neck, his thumb brushing just beneath her ear. The warmth of his skin sent a violent, unfamiliar shiver through her veins.
"Vance destroyed your life piece by piece," Gabriel murmured, his dark eyes boring into hers. "He took your safety. He took your dignity. He made you afraid of your own reflection."
His thumb traced the line of her jawline, slow, deliberate, and fiercely tender.
"I want him to spend the next thirty years in a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute. I want him in general population, where every inmate knows he used to carry a badge. I want him to wake up every morning for the rest of his miserable life knowing that the woman he broke was the one who put him in a cage."
Harper’s breath hitched. Her heart was beating wildly against her ribs, but for the first time in years, it was not beating out of terror.
She looked at Gabriel—at the ruthless, terrifying man the rest of the city feared—and saw the absolute, unyielding wall of iron he had placed between her and the abyss.
"Gabriel," she whispered.
"Don't," he said softly, though his hand didn't move from her neck. "Don't thank me yet."
"I wasn't going to thank you," Harper said.
She took half a step forward, closing the remaining distance between them. She placed her palm flat against his chest, right over his heart. Beneath the fine Italian cotton, his pulse was steady, strong, and entirely unshakeable.
"I want to see it," Harper said.
Gabriel’s eyes darkened. "See what?"
May you like
"I want to see him fall."
***
