Chapter 5 - The Trap at the Warehouse
The rain had stopped by midnight, leaving the streets of the Meatpacking District sheathed in a slick, reflective skin of black ice.
Inside the cavernous, unheated interior of Warehouse 48—an abandoned cold-storage facility down by the Hudson River—the air smelled of rusted iron, rotting fish, and old salt.
I stood in the center of the concrete floor, wearing my dark wool coat, holding the heavy leather ledger tightly against my chest. Twenty feet away, standing beside the idling headlights of three black Escalades, stood my father.
Vincent Marchetti looked every bit of his sixty years, but his posture was an unbent pillar of iron. He wore a heavy black overcoat, his silver hair brushed back, his cold blue eyes fixed on me with an expression of sharp, dangerous disappointment.
"You took four days to retrieve a single ledger, Emily," Vincent said, his voice echoing off the corrugated metal walls. "And you smell of whiskey and Ashford’s cologne. Care to explain why?"
"The security was tighter than you calculated," I lied smoothly, stepping forward and tossing the heavy leather book onto the wooden crate between us. "Katherine Porter was guarding him like a hawk. I had to wait until she poisoned her own fiancé before I could slip into his private safe."
Vincent’s eyebrows arched sharply. "Poison? Katherine tried to kill him?"
"She switched the champagne at the engagement party," I reported, keeping my voice dead level. "She wanted his fortune before the pre-nups went live. I knocked the glass out of his hand."
My father stared at me, his eyes narrowing as if he were trying to read a secret written behind my skull. He stepped forward, picked up the ledger, and flipped it open to the first page.
"You did well, Emily," Vincent said softly, though there was no warmth in his praise. "The Ashford syndicate is finished. With these codes, we control the entire northern shipping lane by Monday morning."
He pulled a heavy, snub-nosed Beretta from his coat pocket and laid it casually on the wooden crate beside the ledger.
"Now... finish it."
My blood ran cold.
"Finish what?" I asked, my voice tightening.
"Daniel Ashford is currently tracking you, isn't he?" Vincent stated, not looking up from the pages. "He knows you have the book. He knows who you are. A man like that doesn't let a Marchetti walk away with his operational blueprints."
"He doesn't know where we are," I lied, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"He knows," a deep, gravelly voice echoed from the shadows of the loading dock doors.
Both my father and I spun around.
Stepping out of the darkness, his black overcoat soaked with mist, his hands empty and loose at his sides, was Daniel Ashford.
Behind him, emerging from the dark corners of the warehouse like ghosts, stood twelve men in tactical gear, their weapons raised and locked squarely onto my father’s security detail.
Vincent didn't panic. He didn't drop the ledger. With terrifying, fluid speed, his hand dipped beneath his coat, drawing his own weapon—
CRACK.
Daniel moved faster.
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Before my father’s finger could even squeeze the trigger, Daniel’s gun barked once. A clean, suppressed shot that struck the concrete two inches from my father’s boot, sending a spray of sharp stone chips against his trousers.
"Drop it, Vincent," Daniel said, his voice dropping into a register of absolute, murderous ice that made the hair on my arms stand up. "Unless you want your daughter to watch you bleed out on this floor."
