Page 127 of The Cost of Silence

“This is a bad idea,” he mutters.

“You signing off on it anyway?” I ask.

He lets out a slow breath. “Yes. With conditions.”

“Of course.”

“You listen to Rossi,” he says. “You don’t argue with Rossi. If he tells you to get down, you get down. If he tells you to move, you move. You don’t stop to pick up your phone or your bag or your dignity, you just do it.”

“Copy that,” I say, trying to keep it light.

His hands frame my face, thumbs brushing my cheekbones. “Call me when you get there. Call me when you leave. Text me in between just to annoy me.”

“I can definitely do that.”

He kisses me—quick, fierce, like he’s trying to seal something in place—and then he steps back, letting Rossi move in.

“Let’s go,” Rossi says gently.

The elevator ride down is quiet. The two guards flanking us stand with their hands behind their backs, eyes straight ahead, the picture of discretion. My reflection on the elevator doors looks composed enough, though my fingers worry the strap of my bag.

When the doors open into the garage, the air is colder, smelling faintly of concrete dust and exhaust. The SUV waits near the ramp, big and black and smug about its safety ratings.

Rossi opens the back door for me. “Middle seat,” he says. “Buckle up.”

“Yes, Dad,” I mutter, climbing in.

He takes the front passenger seat—of course he does—and another man I don’t know well, Marco, slides into the driver’s side. The doors shut with the heavy, reassuring thump of reinforced metal.

“Three blocks,” I tell Marco. “There’s a little independent pharmacy on—”

“We’ve got the address,” Rossi says. “We mapped it last night. No need to worry.”

He says it like that’s going to stop me.

We pull out into daylight. It’s one of those thin autumn mornings where the sun looks like it’s doing its best but doesn’t really mean it, pale light glancing off glass and steel. Pedestrians hunch into their coats. Taxis jostle. Somewhere, a car horn is having an existential crisis.

I watch the city slide by, hands clasped in my lap, listening to the low murmur of Rossi’s instructions to Marco. They talk in shorthand, street names and turn counts, a language of habit and paranoia.

“You okay back there?” Rossi asks after a minute.

“Define okay?”

He gives me a brief look over his shoulder. “On a scale of one to ten, where one is ‘asleep on a beach’ and ten is ‘your building is on fire’, where are you?”

My throat tightens at the wordfire.I swallow. “A strong seven,” I admit. “Possibly an eight.”

“We’ll bring it down,” he says.

He believes it. That helps.

We’re two blocks from the building when it happens.

I’m looking out the window at a woman wrestling a toddler into a stroller, thinking about how normal everyone else’s day seems, when something slams into the side of the SUV with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting a dumpster.

The whole vehicle shudders.

A split second later comes the crack I should have recognized from movies, from documentaries, from every terrible clip I’ve ever watched as research and told myself was distant enough not to touch me.