Chapter 107 - The Price of Paper
Julian Ross didn't look like a man whose office had just been breached.
He wore his suit trousers and a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up twice, exposing a platinum watch that ticked softly in the quiet room. His navy cashmere coat hung on the brass coat rack behind him.
"You really should have taken the five million, Sarah," Ross said, taking a measured sip of his scotch. "Elena was being remarkably generous. In my experience, women in her position rarely offer seven figures to the daughters of their former business partners."
I kept the blue binder pressed against my chest.
"You engineered this," I said, my voice steady despite the cold dread coiling in my gut. "The Anvil didn't kidnap Mia because Marcus had drug debts. You leaked Mia’s location to Evelyn Miller so Marcus would be distracted fighting a war while you and Elena finalized the transfer."
Ross offered an appreciative nod, tilting his glass toward me.
"Give credit where it’s due, Miss Cole. Elena is the visionary; I am merely the technician. Marcus was becoming an obstacle. He wanted to go legitimate. He wanted to build sports complexes and clean docks. He was talking about setting up an irrevocable trust for Mia that would have required independent forensic audits of every title back to 1980."
Ross set his glass on the blotter, his thumb lightly resting against the pistol's safety catch.
"An audit would have revealed that your father’s name was still on the underlying deeds. It would have unraveled twenty years of offshore financing. Elena couldn't allow that. And frankly, neither could I. My firm holds a twelve-percent equity carry in the rail yard development."
"And Evelyn Miller?" I asked, buying time, my eyes searching the desk for anything heavy. "You used her."
"Evelyn was an amateur," Ross said dismissively. "A bitter former associate who thought she was running an extortion syndicate. We fed her the intelligence on Marcus's safehouses, let her do the heavy lifting of breaking his perimeter, and waited for Marcus to kill her. It was remarkably clean. Marcus takes out the Anvil, takes three bullets for his trouble, and walks into court tomorrow as a broken man willing to sign whatever I put in front of him to save his daughter."
He pointed the gun at the leather binder in my hands.
"Put Schedule G on the desk, Sarah."
"If you shoot me here," I said, "the building security knows I came up to forty-two. You can't clean this up before nine AM."
Ross smiled—a cold, pitying expression.
"The building security belongs to a subsidiary of Vance Enterprises, Miss Cole. Which means, as of midnight tonight, they report directly to Elena’s holding company. If you die in this office, you are an unauthorized trespasser who broke into a private safe during a blizzard. The police won't even finish the preliminary report before Marcus signs the allocution."
He stood up, the pistol leveling directly at the bridge of my nose.
"Put it down."
I took a slow breath. I lowered the binder toward the mahogany desk, my fingers loosening on the leather binding.
"You're right about one thing, Ross," I said quietly.
"What's that?"
"Marcus is a soldier."
A sudden, concussive crack shattered the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window behind Ross's desk.
A high-velocity sniper round tore through the double-paned storm glass, passing within three inches of Ross's ear and obliterating the heavy crystal scotch decanter on the credenza into a cloud of amber spray and glass shards.
Ross gasped, ducking violently as the freezing blizzard winds howled through the ruined window, scattering hundreds of legal documents across the office like a paper blizzard.
I didn't wait.
I lunged forward, grabbed the heavy marble desk clock from the corner of the blotter, and slammed it across Ross's right wrist.
The pistol fired once into the floor, the silenced thud muffled by the roar of the wind, before slipping from his fingers and sliding across the wet carpet.
Ross lunged for it, his face twisted in shock, but I was already moving. I snatched the blue binder, hooked the strap of my father’s drafting tube over my shoulder, and sprinted through the open double doors into the hallway.
Behind me, Ross screamed for security, his voice drowned out by the gale-force wind ripping through the forty-second floor.
I hit the emergency stairwell door, threw my weight against the panic bar, and plunged into the concrete spiral, running downward as fast as my boots could carry me.
Down four flights, on the thirty-eighth-floor landing, the door flew open.
Declan stood there, his coat covered in snow, holding a heavy iron pry bar in his gloved hand.
"Down here, Sarah!" he barked, grabbing my arm to steady me. "The freight elevator on thirty-six is manually locked for us. Marcus is waiting on the lower ramp."
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"Did he take the shot?" I gasped, clutching the binder to my ribs as we flew down the concrete stairs.
"Marcus has three broken ribs and a shattered shoulder," Declan said with a grim, humorless grin as he kicked open the fire door to the service bay. "He couldn't hold a rifle steady to save his life. That was his old spotter from the 75th Rangers. Move!"
