❤️ BECAUSE IT WAS YOU

Chapter 01 - The Call at 11:42

Rain turned Manhattan into a smear of silver and red beyond the windshield.

Andrew Carter drove with both hands locked around the steering wheel, his shoulders rigid beneath a black dress shirt he had not bothered to button at the throat. Ten minutes earlier, he had been sitting in a warehouse office in Red Hook, listening to a frightened distributor explain why three of Andrew’s containers had vanished between Newark and Queens.

Now he was doing ninety on the FDR because Cindy Stone had called him and cried.

Not complained. Not asked for help in that brisk, capable voice she used whenever someone had broken a schedule or misplaced a contract. Cried.

The sound had lasted less than three seconds.

It had been enough.

At 11:42 p.m., his private phone had vibrated across the scarred desk while Rossi was still talking about customs delays. That phone was not for business. One number belonged to the nursing facility where Andrew’s mother lived. The other belonged to Cindy.

Andrew had answered with his usual single word.

“Speak.”

For a moment, there had been only breathing.

Then Cindy whispered, “Andrew.”

He knew at once.

A crash had sounded behind her. A man’s voice. Another crash. Then Cindy said, “Please, no,” in a voice so unlike her own that something inside Andrew went cold.

The line died before she could tell him where she was.

Lucas Brooks traced her location before Andrew reached the warehouse door.

“East Forty-Second,” Lucas had said, following with the warning he gave Andrew whenever instinct threatened to outrun strategy. “Could be a setup.”

Andrew had not cared.

He still did not.

Beside him, Lucas braced one palm against the dashboard as the SUV cut across two lanes. His other hand rested near the pistol beneath his jacket.

“If we survive this drive,” he said evenly, “I’d like to remind you that the city employs ambulances.”

Andrew’s jaw tightened.

Lucas looked at him once and stopped talking.

Cindy had worked for Andrew for three years. Officially, she was executive assistant to the CEO of Carter Logistics, one of the largest privately held shipping firms on the East Coast. Unofficially, she was the only person in Andrew’s life who could walk into his office, remove the untouched lunch from his desk, and tell him he was being an idiot without fearing for her job.

She was twenty-six, too young to carry the exhaustion she sometimes hid beneath concealer, too proud to admit how much money she sent home to her younger sister, and too stubborn to let Andrew pay off the student loans he had learned about through a routine background check.

She knew Carter Logistics had rooms with locked doors.

She was smart enough not to ask what was behind them.

Three weeks ago, Andrew had noticed bruises circling her wrist.

“Cabinet door,” she had said.

He had accepted the answer because Cindy had looked him directly in the eye when she gave it.

That mistake now sat in his stomach like broken glass.

“Alley,” Lucas said.

Andrew cut hard onto Forty-First, mounted half the curb, and stopped behind Cindy’s building with the SUV still rocking.

The rain hit him the second he stepped outside.

He barely felt it.

Cindy lived on the third floor of a narrow prewar building wedged between a dry cleaner and a restaurant that never seemed to close. Andrew had driven her home once after a company gala. He remembered the green awning, the chipped brass numbers, the fire escape running down the back wall.

He took the metal stairs two at a time.

“Andrew.” Lucas was behind him. “Let me clear it.”

Andrew reached the third-floor landing.

The blinds were shut.

A strip of yellow light showed beneath them.

No movement.

No sound.

The silence was worse than the crying.

Lucas lifted three fingers.

Andrew did not wait for one.

He wrapped his jacket around his fist, broke the lower pane, reached through, and unlocked the window.

The apartment looked as though someone had taken a hammer to Cindy’s life.

Her coffee table was split through the middle. Books covered the floor. A lamp lay on its side, throwing weak light against a wall where three framed photographs had been knocked crooked.

David Mercer stood near the hallway holding a baseball bat.

Andrew recognized him from the photograph Cindy had once kept beside her computer before quietly removing it six months earlier.

David was bigger in person. Thick forearms. Grease beneath his nails. Eyes reddened by alcohol or rage.

Andrew looked past him.

Cindy sat against the wall.

Her knees were pulled to her chest. Her white blouse had torn at the shoulder. A thin line of blood ran from her hairline to her cheek, disappearing beneath her jaw. Her honey-blond hair hung wet around her face as if she had been outside before David dragged her back in.

She was shaking so hard Andrew could see it from across the room.

David raised the bat.

“Who the hell are—”

Andrew crossed the distance before he finished.

David swung.

Andrew stepped inside the arc and drove his fist into David’s ribs.

The bat struck the wall instead of Andrew’s skull. David folded, gasping, and Andrew hit him again.

There was no satisfaction in it.

Only control.

David reached for him, wild and clumsy. Andrew caught his wrist, twisted, and sent him facedown into the broken coffee table.

Lucas took over.

“Stay there,” Lucas said, planting a knee between David’s shoulders.

David spat something Andrew did not hear.

Because Cindy had said his name.

“Andrew.”

He turned.

For the first time in his adult life, Andrew Carter did not know what to do with his hands.

He had handled guns, blood, contracts, politicians, and men who smiled while arranging funerals. None of those things had prepared him for the sight of Cindy recoiling when he took one step toward her.

So he stopped.

“It’s me,” he said.

Her eyes found his.

The fear changed. Not gone. Just redirected, as though she were trying to remember which world she was in.

Andrew slowly lowered himself to one knee.

“You’re safe.”

Her mouth trembled.

Behind him, David laughed.

It was wet and ugly.

“She’s not safe with you.”

Lucas shoved him harder against the floor.

“Quiet.”

David turned his face enough to look at Andrew.

“You don’t even know who she is.”

Andrew’s gaze sharpened.

Cindy went very still.

For a second she was back in her grandmother’s kitchen at sixteen, hearing a rule she had never understood: Never give strangers your mother’s full name. Her grandmother had said it while slicing peaches, as casually as if she were reminding Cindy to lock the back door. When Cindy laughed, the older woman had not.

There had been other odd rules. No family photographs online. No newspaper wedding announcements. No answering questions about where Elaine had worked before moving to Ohio. Cindy had filed all of it under grief, the harmless superstitions of people who had lost someone too young.

Now David’s words rearranged those memories.

You don’t even know who she is.

David had said it as though Cindy herself were evidence.

That frightened him more than anything that had happened since the phone call.

“What does that mean?” Andrew asked.

David smiled through blood on his teeth.

Cindy whispered, “Don’t.”

Andrew looked back at her.

Her expression was not confusion.

It was recognition.

Twenty minutes later, David was gone.

Lucas had people who could make sure the police received a version of events that involved an abusive ex-boyfriend, an anonymous emergency call, and no mention of how two armed men had entered through a third-floor window. Andrew did not ask for details. He was no longer interested in David.

He was interested in why Cindy had been terrified of whatever David was about to say.

But he did not question her.

Not yet.

He took her to his penthouse instead of a hospital only after a private physician met them in the underground garage, cleaned the cut near her temple, checked her pupils, and confirmed she did not need stitches. Cindy refused the emergency room with such quiet panic that Andrew let the matter go.

At 1:17 a.m., she sat curled into the corner of his beige sofa beneath a dark jacket that swallowed her narrow shoulders.

The skyline beyond the glass glowed blue and silver.

Someone had left candles burning from an earlier dinner Andrew had never attended. Their flames trembled each time the ventilation system stirred the air.

A glass of water sat untouched on the marble table.

Cindy held her phone loosely in one hand.

Andrew sat beside her, close enough to catch her if she folded in on herself, far enough not to crowd her.

For nearly a minute, neither of them spoke.

Then Cindy said, “He told me no one would come.”

Andrew’s jaw tightened.

“I came.”

She looked at him.

There were questions in her face that had nothing to do with David.

“Why?”

Andrew knew what she meant.

Why not Lucas? Why not security? Why would a man who delegated everything from transportation to retaliation abandon a negotiation, drive through Manhattan himself, and climb a fire escape in the rain?

There were safer answers.

He chose none of them.

“Because it was you.”

Cindy stared at him for a long moment.

Then she lowered her head onto his shoulder.

Andrew wrapped one arm around her carefully.

Her breathing began to slow.

Five minutes passed before he realized the phone in her hand had lit up.

A new message filled the screen.

Cindy saw it at the same moment he did.

UNKNOWN NUMBER:

YOU SHOULD HAVE LET DAVID FINISH. ASK ANDREW WHAT HIS FATHER DID TO YOUR MOTHER.