Chapter 3 Wanted

They took me up in the private elevator, the one with no buttons, only a lock. Rafe stood beside me and said nothing, and I stared at the polished brass doors and watched my own face go gray. Castellane. I knew the name. Everyone in Philadelphia knew it. It was on the hospital wing and the stadium suites and the side of half the shipping trucks on Delaware Avenue. It was also, if you listened to the right people in the right kitchens, a name you said quietly. Forty-one floors up, the doors opened on the same black door and the same brass number. In daylight, the suite was even bigger. White carpet, white sofas, and that wall of glass full of a hard, bright sky. The wall safe behind the painting stood open and empty. Beside it, at the window, a man had his back to me. He turned around. For a half second, there was no mistake. His face changed. Something flashed there, raw and startled and almost glad. Then it closed, like a door shutting on a lit room, and what was left was a stranger in a charcoal suit with his hands in his pockets. "You," Adrian said. "You," I whispered. "Boss," said Rafe from the door, "this is the housekeeper. Santos, Maribel. Employee since..." "I know who she is." He did not look away from me. "Leave us." The door shut. The silence was terrible. I felt every bit of my uniform, every wrinkle, every stain, as if I stood naked in a snowstorm. "You're the don," I said stupidly. "I'm Adrian Castellane." His voice was flat and careful, the voice of the man who had run a family since his father was shot two years ago. "I was not lying last night. I do run a company. I just run several." "The man in the chair. The one who couldn't sleep." "He exists." A muscle flickered in his jaw. "He doesn't, officially. Do you know what was in that safe?" "No." "Two million, one hundred thousand dollars. Cash, collected for a delivery that came due this morning. It was here when I fell asleep. It was gone when I woke." The room tilted. "You think I..." "I think a housekeeper walked into a locked suite with a master key at one in the morning," said Adrian, "and I think I woke up with the best sleep I've had in three years and an empty safe. I would like very much to be wrong. Tell me I'm wrong." "I took a picture on your bed, I mean, I was going to, I never even..." My voice cracked and I hated it. "I didn't touch your safe. I was asleep." "So was I," he said quietly. "That's the part that bothers me." He crossed the room and set something on the glass table between us. The green key card. Mine. It had come out of my fist at the elevator without my noticing, and I had never felt it fall. "This opened my door at 12:58," he said. "It is registered to you." I stared at it. Everything I had ever been told about the safest thing to do in a room with a dangerous man ran through my head, and none of it was any use. "Do you know," Adrian said, almost gently, "what my family does to people who rob us?"