Page 58 of Freedom’s Inferno

“What do you think it means?”

He dragged a hand through his thick, brown hair. “I don’t know yet,” he said, slipping the card into his back pocket.

I drew a shaky breath and looked back into the box. Beneath the documents sat a small stack of photographs bound together with a rubber band. They appeared glossy, as if freshly printed. They were too new, too deliberate, as though someone had handled them recently, someone who wanted me to see them. The second I touched them, a chill crawled up my spine.

The first was me. I stood on my back porch, a joint between my fingers, hair loose and wild. I thought I was alone. The grain of the photo was tight and crisp, taken from a distance with professional equipment. Someone had been watching me.

The second photo was worse. Charlie and I climbing off the motorcycle in my driveway, his hand still resting on my hip. The shot was taken from across the street, through the dark. My hands trembled as I rifled through to the third photo. Charlie and I sitting on the curb outside of Blackwell Sterling faces washed in orange from the firelight. The shot was too close. Too intimate.

“My God.” Charlie leaned over my shoulder, his bandaged hand coming to rest on mine where my fingers clutched the photos.

My pulse hammered. The floor dropped out from under me when I flipped to the final photograph. Charlie and me again. This time in the hotel room. The light was faint and gray with dawn. We were asleep, bodies tangled together under the sheets. The image blurred at the edges, slightly off—shot through glass, or something like it.

From the window.

Across the bottom of the photo, in thick, black Sharpie, two words cut through the image: Tick tock.

The blood drained from my face. For a long, unbearable moment, the only sound was the whooshing in my ears.

“Jesus Christ,” Charlie whispered, his voice hoarse, almost inaudible. He reached over my shoulder to grab the picture from my fingers, holding it up before the both of us. “Costa.”

“His men,” I whispered. “They’ve been following us from the start.”

He nodded once, jaw tight. “And he’s already been here.”

The realization landed heavy. Costa had been one step ahead this entire time. Not only did he already know about the deposit box, he’d gotten someone on the inside to open it and slip in this nightmare.

The back of my neck prickled. I turned, scanning the marble lobby through the reflection in the glass. The tellers, the security guard by the door, the woman filling out a deposit slip near the counter. Every face seemed to tilt toward us, every movement a fraction too deliberate.

“Charlie,” I said.

He looked up, his gaze sweeping the room before meeting mine. The flicker in his eyes told me he felt it too. “We’re leaving,” he said.

We moved toward the exit, side by side, our reflections gliding across the marble like twin ghosts. The doors loomed ahead, sunlight spilling through the glass, but the air pressed in close—too many eyes, or the sense of them.

The air outside hit colder than it should have been. The autumn wind caught my hair and tangled it against my cheek, carrying the metallic taste of the city and something like dread.

I kept walking, heels striking the pavement in steady, defiant beats, each one a small reminder that I was still moving, still here.

Charlie’s stride matched mine, silent but solid. He didn’t touch me, he didn’t have to. His presence built a wall between me and the rest of the world. Behind us, the glass doors whispered shut, sealing the vault, the box, and those damning photos inside it.

I took a shuddering breath, the air fighting its way past the panic still coiled beneath my ribs. Those two words written in bold lettering across the final photograph were burned into my mind. Tick tock. Costa’s men had been circling, letting us run ourselves ragged while they watched from somewhere out of sight.

We reached the car, the Lexus gleaming too bright under the sunlight.

Charlie unlocked it without a word.

I slid inside, gripping my purse like armor. Through the windshield, the city moved as if nothing had changed, but everything had tilted a few degrees off its axis.

“He slipped those photos in there to taunt us,” I said, my voice small in the space between us.

Charlie started the engine, the low hum filling the silence. “Yeah.”

My pulse quickened. “He’s not going to stop.”

“No,” Charlie said. “But neither are we.” He sat there a moment, hands on the wheel, engine idling. His jaw worked through whatever he was thinking before he said it. “We’ll regroup at the hotel.”

I turned to look at him. "He knows we’re there. Those photos were taken from the window‒”