Chapter 6 - The Secret of Maine
Twelve years earlier, on a jagged spit of granite outside Machiasport, Maine, a twenty-six-year-old Adrian Cole had crawled out of the icy, black surf of the Atlantic Ocean with three hollow-point bullets in his side and two broken ribs.
His syndicate had been betrayed. His partners had taken his money, executed his brother, and dumped his body into the bay wrapped in anchor chains.
He had expected to die on the freezing rocks, listening to the winter gales tear through the pines.
Instead, warm hands had found him in the dark.
A twenty-year-old girl with a long, thick brown braid that fell past her waist had dragged his six-foot-three frame through the snow, inch by agonizing inch, into the basement of a drafty, leaking clapboard house. She had spent three weeks boiling well water on a cast-iron stove, digging out lead fragments with sewing needles, and pressing clean strips of linen against his burning flesh.
Her name was Nora Bennett.
She lived alone with her blind grandmother, surviving on salt cod, garden potatoes, and the quiet dignity of women who asked nothing from a cruel world.
Adrian had been delirious with septic fever for fourteen days. He remembered only three things from that dark cellar: the scent of sweet pine soap, the soft, melodious voice of a girl whispering Bible verses into the dark to keep him breathing, and the sensation of her heavy, silky braid brushing against his fevered chest as she leaned over him to change his bandages.
On the night his fever broke, Nora’s grandmother had pressed half of a silver compass into Adrian’s palm. “Take it, boy,” the old woman had said. “My husband carried it through forty winters on the Grand Banks. If you live, find your way back to where you belong.”
The next morning, before the dawn could reveal his location to the hitmen combing the coastal highway, Adrian had slipped out into the fog. He had left no note, only an unspoken vow carved into the marrow of his bones: I will make myself a king, and then I will come back and give her an empire.
It had taken him seven years of blood, fire, and ruthless execution to wipe out his enemies and claim the eastern seaboard.
When he finally drove a convoy of black sedans down that desolate Maine road five years ago, his heart pounding against his ribs like a sledgehammer, he had found only charred timber and weeds.
A chimney fire had consumed the clapboard house. The old grandmother was buried in the municipal cemetery on the hill. And the girl with the braid was gone—erased into the vast, anonymous machinery of the northeast working class.
He had spent two million dollars on private investigators. He had searched Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal.
He had never thought to search his own kitchen.
“You were here,” Adrian rasped, his vision blurring as he looked at Nora. His hand reached out, his thumb gently catching the tear tracing down her cheek. “Five years... you were in this house. Scrubbing my floors. Washing my clothes. Watching me walk past you in the corridors.”
“You were building an empire, Adrian,” Nora whispered, her voice trembling with the weight of five years of silence. “You were surrounded by men with blood on their hands and politicians with knives behind their smiles. What would a broken man who became a monster do with a fisherman’s granddaughter?”
“I would have laid the world at your feet!” Adrian roared, the grief tearing out of his chest like shrapnel. “I would have burned this entire city to the ground if you had asked for warmth! Why didn't you speak? Why didn't you show me the compass?”
“Because I didn't want the king,” Nora said softly, her dark eyes searching his with an aching, devastating honesty. “I wanted the boy who cried in my cellar because he missed his brother. And I needed to know if he was still alive inside you... or if the ocean had drowned him after all.”
Marcus Kane returned to the rotunda.
He walked with measured, solemn steps, carrying a polished silver tray lined with white velvet. Resting upon the velvet was nearly two feet of thick, dark brown hair—bound together with a scrap of kitchen twine where Nora had desperately tried to preserve it.
The entire room seemed to draw a ragged, collective breath.
Adrian looked down at the hair.
His face underwent a transformation so absolute, so complete in its cold, terrifying finality, that even Frank Vance instinctively stepped back two paces.
May you like
The boy from Maine was gone.
The king of the eastern underworld had returned.
