Chapter 4 - The Fire They Started Twice
By the time we reached my street, flames were rolling out of my third-floor windows.
Fire engines blocked the intersection. Neighbors stood in the rain wearing coats over pajamas while smoke climbed between the buildings. I pushed toward the barricade, but Adrian caught my arm.
“My cat,” I said.
“You do not have a cat.”
“My neighbor does. Mrs. Alvarez keeps him when she works nights. He hides in my bedroom.”
I twisted free and ran.
A firefighter shouted as I ducked beneath the tape. Heat struck my face from half a block away. The front entrance was already vomiting black smoke.
Then Lena was beside me.
“Third floor, rear bedroom?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She signaled to a firefighter she seemed to know. Within seconds, two masked figures entered the building.
I stood helplessly in the rain while everything I owned burned: my father’s watch, my mother’s letters, the framed paramedic certificate she had seen before cancer took her, the cheap couch where I had slept sitting up after shoulder surgery. Flames erased years without hesitation.
Adrian stood several feet away, issuing quiet commands into his phone. Men arrived who did not look like firefighters or police. They spread through the crowd, watching faces instead of flames.
The firefighter emerged carrying an orange cat wrapped in a wet towel.
Mrs. Alvarez sobbed and clutched him against her chest. I nearly collapsed from relief.
Then the roof over my bedroom caved in.
Adrian caught me before my knees reached the pavement.
“They wanted the evidence destroyed,” he said.
“What evidence? I didn’t know any of this existed.”
“Perhaps your father left something they believe you have.”
“I have nothing.”
“Then they are afraid you might discover where he put it.”
A police detective approached. His badge read SULLIVAN. He was in his fifties, with tired eyes and a rain-darkened trench coat.
“Ms. Callahan?” he asked. “Any reason someone would target your apartment?”
Before I could answer, Adrian stepped beside me.
Sullivan’s expression changed instantly. “Mr. Hargrove.”
“Detective.”
The single word carried history.
Sullivan looked from Adrian to me. “You two know each other?”
“We met yesterday,” I said.
Adrian said, “She works for my family.”
“I do not.”
“Tonight you do.”
Sullivan rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Arson team found the rear lock drilled. Whoever entered knew the building’s camera had been broken for six months.”
“It has been broken for eight,” I said.
He studied me. “You reported it?”
“Repeatedly.”
“Landlord ignored you?”
“Repeatedly.”
Adrian glanced at Lena. She understood something without being told and walked away making a phone call.
“I need a statement,” Sullivan said.
“I’ll give one.”
“Privately.” His eyes flicked toward Adrian. “At the station.”
Adrian’s voice cooled. “She was shot at ninety minutes ago.”
Sullivan went very still. “Where?”
“My mother’s home.”
The detective swore under his breath. “You should have called.”
“I am calling now.”
“That is not how police reports work.”
“It is how surviving works.”
I stepped between them before the testosterone became combustible. “Detective, I will come tomorrow morning. Tonight I have no clothes, no home, and no idea why someone has been photographing me.”
Sullivan’s gaze sharpened. “Photographing you?”
Adrian handed him one image—the least revealing. Sullivan examined it and then looked toward the burning building.
“Ms. Callahan, do exactly what he says tonight,” he said quietly.
I blinked. “You were just arguing with him.”
“I can dislike his methods and still recognize a war zone.”
The safe house was not a house. It was the top two floors of a converted warehouse along the river, with bulletproof windows, a private elevator, and enough security cameras to monitor a small nation.
Adrian gave me a guest room larger than my apartment.
On the bed waited new clothes in my size.
I stared at them. “How did you know?”
“Lena.”
“That does not explain it.”
“She checked the size labels on the coat you left in the library.”
“That is invasive.”
“It is efficient.”
I turned and found him leaning against the doorframe, jacket gone, white shirt marked by a line of blood near his ribs.
“You’re injured.”
“It is nothing.”
“That phrase is forbidden around paramedics.”
He looked down as if surprised to find blood on himself. A fragment of glass had sliced his side when he covered me in the library.
“Sit,” I ordered.
One eyebrow lifted.
“Now.”
Perhaps no one spoke to Adrian Hargrove that way. That possibility improved my mood.
He sat on the edge of a chair while I opened the medical kit Lena had placed in the bathroom. The cut was long but shallow. I cleaned it in silence.
“You protected me,” I said.
“You were closest to the window.”
“That was not an answer.”
His mouth almost curved. “It was the useful part of one.”
I recognized Lena’s phrase and shook my head.
As I taped gauze over the wound, I noticed older scars across his ribs and shoulder. Some were narrow. One was round and puckered.
“Bullet?” I asked.
“Years ago.”
“Occupational hazard of controlling Chicago?”
“Something like that.”
The humor vanished when his phone rang.
Lena’s voice came over speaker. “We searched Nora’s insurance records. After the St. Catherine’s fire, a claim was filed for Patrick Callahan’s personal effects. One item was missing from the inventory.”
“What item?” I asked.
“A red metal toolbox recovered from the basement.”
I stopped breathing.
My mother had kept a red toolbox in the hall closet until she died. After the funeral, I donated most of the contents to a vocational school.
Most—but not all.
“There was a false bottom,” I whispered.
Adrian stood. “What was inside?”
“A brass key and a cassette tape. I thought they were junk.”
“Where are they now?”
I pictured the small box of my father’s belongings I had taken to the cemetery every year on the anniversary of his death. I had hidden it somewhere no landlord, thief, or creditor could touch.
“In a storage locker beneath Union Station.”
A heavy impact sounded from the floor below.
Then the lights went out.
Emergency red flooded the room.
Lena’s voice snapped through the speaker. “Security breach. Four armed men entered through the loading bay.”
Adrian drew his gun and pushed me behind him.
May you like
From the dark hallway came a familiar voice—smooth, amused, and close.
“Cousin,” Damian Hargrove called, “you always did bring your problems home.”
