The Man Gabriel Trusted Most
Chapter 05 - The Man Gabriel Trusted Most
Leo did not reach for his gun.
That saved his life.
Gabriel crossed the room and drove him into the wall hard enough to shake a framed photograph loose.
Norah flinched.
Rosa did not.
“Who gave you the report?” Gabriel demanded.
Leo’s hands stayed open at his sides. “Dr. Mercer’s office.”
“Who called you?”
“Your lawyer.”
“Which lawyer?”
Leo hesitated.
Gabriel’s forearm pressed harder across his chest.
“Daniel Cross.”
Rosa closed her eyes.
Gabriel looked at her. “You know something.”
“I know Daniel’s father worked for Sebastian.”
Gabriel stepped back from Leo.
The implications widened quickly.
Daniel Cross had handled Gabriel’s corporate work for twelve years. He knew trust structures, property holdings, private numbers, travel schedules. He also controlled the holding company whose post office box had received notices for Norah’s Maine property.
Norah spoke first. “So Daniel could have hidden the deed from Gabriel.”
“Yes,” Leo said, rubbing his shoulder.
“And known I owned this house.”
“Yes.”
“And known I went to see Gabriel yesterday.”
Leo’s face darkened. “Security logs go to his office.”
Gabriel turned toward the window.
Norah could almost see the structure of his world breaking apart inside his head.
Rosa poured coffee nobody wanted.
“Suspicion is useful in small doses,” she said. “Too much and it becomes poison of its own.”
Gabriel gave her a bitter look. “You disappeared for twenty-one years.”
“And I paid for that choice every day.”
The room quieted.
Rosa sat beside Norah.
“Claire paid too.”
Norah looked at her.
“What did my mother know?”
“Enough to be dangerous.”
“Why involve her at all?”
“I didn’t intend to. She found me half-conscious behind her building after the fire. She treated my burns. When I told her men might come, she hid me in the laundry room at St. Vincent’s for three nights.”
That sounded like Claire.
Norah remembered her mother bringing home injured birds in shoeboxes and once keeping a battered woman from upstairs on their sofa for a week without asking questions.
“She should have walked away,” Rosa said. “Instead, she helped me disappear.”
“And me?”
Rosa’s face softened. “You were not part of it at first.”
“At first?”
“Years later, Claire saw Sebastian outside your school.”
Norah’s stomach tightened.
“He knew who she was?”
“He knew she had helped me. He did not know where I was. He threatened you to make her talk.”
“Did she?”
“No.”
“What did she do?”
“She moved you three times in eighteen months. Then she brought you here for one week.”
The missing summer.
Norah looked toward the photograph of herself at twelve.
“Why don’t I remember?”
Rosa hesitated.
“You had pneumonia by the time you arrived. A doctor in Rockland treated you. You slept most of those first two days from fever and medication. By the time you improved, Claire had decided you could never know the truth. You remembered it as illness because that was the part no one had to lie about.”
Norah pressed her fingertips against her eyes.
She was angry at a dead mother and an old woman she had just gotten back.
The combination exhausted her.
Gabriel noticed.
“Enough for tonight.”
Rosa raised an eyebrow.
Norah almost smiled. “He’s right.”
Gabriel looked surprised by the support.
“You need sleep too,” Norah added.
His expression immediately soured.
There were four bedrooms. Rosa took the downstairs room. Leo slept on a sofa near the front door. Two guards rotated outside.
Norah’s room faced the ocean.
She could not sleep.
At three in the morning, she found Gabriel on the porch in shirtsleeves, staring into the black water.
“You’ll freeze.”
“I’ve been colder.”
“That doesn’t make this intelligent.”
He glanced at her. “You do this a lot.”
“What?”
“Talk to me like I’m an ordinary man.”
“You are an ordinary man.”
His laugh was quiet.
“No, I’m not.”
“You get hungry. You get tired. Your mother embarrasses you. You nearly fall over when you don’t eat. That’s pretty ordinary.”
The wind lifted strands of her hair.
Gabriel took off his coat from the porch chair and put it around her shoulders instead of his own.
She did not object.
“What did you want before nursing?” he asked.
Norah looked out at the water.
“To leave.”
“The Narrows?”
“Everything.”
“Where?”
“I used to think somewhere warm. Arizona. California. Anywhere without radiators that screamed all winter.”
“What changed?”
“My mother got sick.”
He did not ask what from. Norah was grateful.
“I stayed,” she said. “Then after she died, staying became a habit.”
Gabriel nodded as though he understood too well.
“What did you want?” she asked.
He looked at his hands.
“To restore old houses.”
Norah laughed before she could stop herself.
His eyebrows rose.
“I’m sorry. I expected race cars. International crime. Something dramatic.”
“I liked woodwork.”
“Liked?”
“I still do.”
For the first time, she saw what Gabriel might have been if his life had bent a different way.
The thought frightened her more than the guns.
Not because she was afraid of him.
Because she was beginning not to be.
A phone vibrated inside the house.
Leo appeared at the door seconds later.
“Boss.”
Something in his face erased the softness of the moment.
Gabriel went inside.
Leo held out a phone showing security footage from Gabriel’s penthouse garage.
Daniel Cross had arrived there at 1:12 a.m.
He was carrying a briefcase.
He left seven minutes later.
“Did he have authorization?” Gabriel asked.
“No.”
“What did he access?”
“We’re checking.”
A second message arrived.
Leo read it and swore.
“The medical examiner, Dr. Mercer, is dead.”
“When?”
“About an hour ago. Car went off an overpass.”
Rosa’s face tightened.
Norah looked at Gabriel.
He was no longer the exhausted man on the porch.
The boss had returned.
But this time, instead of reaching for a gun, he looked at Norah.
“What would a normal man do?”
She understood the question beneath the question.
“Get proof,” she said. “Before anger destroys what the truth could save.”
Gabriel nodded once.
Then Leo’s phone rang again.
The man on the other end spoke so loudly that Norah heard fragments from across the room.
Fire.
Penthouse.
May you like
Explosion.
And Daniel Cross was missing.
