Page 46 of The Silent Hour

Three pages of notes huddled beneath it, script so dense and angry it looked less like writing and more like scarring. One name glared back in thick, unforgiving ink.

DOMINIC CORTEZ.

I’d underlined it twice with enough pressure to carve a furrow through three sheets beneath. Cortez hadn’t come himself. He couldn’t. Unlike Ruiz, who moved through the city like a shark in clean water, greasing palms and pulling strings—Cortez was cooling his heels in federal lockup without bail while the DOJ polished its knives. So he’d sent blood. His son and grandfather walked into my office like something out of a sepia photograph, two generations bound by something thicker than law.

The old man held himself like a monumental relic shipped from Havana—spine straight as a ruler, voice deliberate, each word measured before release. The grandson was sleeker. Younger. Dressed in a suit that cost more than my first car but hung on him like he’d borrowed it from his father’s closet. I’d heard the Cortez name whispered in certain circles for years. Never thought I’d hear it echo off my own office walls.

He already had counsel.

Good counsel, at that.

Which meant if his family was standing inside the Marcelli Group asking for me by name, something had cracked open at the foundation. Loyalty had broken, leverage had shifted, or Cortez had decided he needed a scalpel instead of the sledgehammer currently representing him, some blunt instrument in a good suit who'd been swinging hard and hitting air.

Sending blood instead of some intermediary wasn't merely business. It was also a message written in a language older than contracts. I understood it, but that didn't mean I had to kneel for it.

Cortez was the kind of man whose cash came wrapped in plastic and smelled faintly of bleach, whose shadow crossing the wrong wall was enough to make witnesses develop sudden, catastrophic amnesia. The kind of man whose name, spoken at the wrong volume in the wrong room, had a way of rearranging the furniture of people's lives permanently.

If I waded into that sewage, I'd need more than armor. I'd need a full tactical map. Knox would have to walk every exit before we ever set foot in the room—contingencies stacked on contingencies, each one pressure-tested.

Rafa, the human bloodhound who'd once gone three days without sleep on nicotine gum and pure fucking spite until he found a decimal-point error that dragged a man back from death row, would need to disembowel every record he could get his hands on, the ones filed in triplicate and the ones that didn't officially exist.

Eric, whose obsessive attention to detail had long since crossed the border into something that made psychiatrists reach for their notepads, would become my second shadow. He'd catalog every micro expression, every throat clear, every half-second hesitation and involuntary twitch until we knew Cortez's tells better than the people who'd shared a table with him for thirty years.

The payout was beyond lucrative. Seven figures with a comma in a place that made the number feel almost fictional. The kind of money that would've made my younger self—the one eating vending machine dinners in a library carrel, running on caffeine and the specific terror of student debt—crawl across broken glass just to lick the envelope.

But I wasn't that desperate kid anymore, white-knuckling billable hours like a junkie rationing his last hit. I didn't need Cortez's blood money. However, I wanted the win. I wanted the high of walking into a courtroom where every person in a good suit had already decided my client was finished, and the verdict felt like a formality, a clerical matter, a box to check before sentencing.

And then I wanted them watching that certainty dissolve in real time under cross-examination, the prosecutor's careful architecture coming apart beam by beam. That split second when they realized they'd miscalculated the room. That was the thing I kept coming back for.

If I walked away from this case, some second-rate hack would take it. Some overconfident Harvard prick trailing a long list of connections and a short list of actual courtroom hours would stumble into something with moving parts he'd never seen before, and people would start bleeding out while he stammered through depositions with his hand on a textbook.

This wasn't about morality.

It was about the fact that no one else in this city cut as deep or as clean as we did, and no one else had the scar tissue to know how to stanch the bleeding when the work got ugly.

I'd need more hands, though.

Ruiz alone had already swallowed half the damn floor. Laurel was running point on scheduling, every client visit and phone call flowing through her before it ever touched us. Eric kept discovery locked down, cataloging motions, briefs, evidence, and every scrap of information until the war room looked exactly like what we'd nicknamed it. A military command center.

Still, I wasn't blind to the danger.

I'd already messaged my father, asking what he knew about Cortez beyond what existed on paper. While I waited, I had another call out to one of my own contacts, someone who could dig into places the usual files didn't reach.

Patience was a virtue.

Foresight was survival.

I leaned back and pressed two fingers into the knot forming at the base of my skull, the one that lived there permanently now, like a tenant I'd stopped trying to evict—Julia.

The memory arrived uninvited, the way it always did. The warmth of her skin in the dark, the sound she made when she finally fell asleep, the way she still reached for me even then. A decade of that. Two daughters with her mouth and her stubbornness, and I was still not used to it.

Knox liked to remind me it had started with a tie—his idea, his club, his insufferable self-congratulation ever since. He'd be collecting on that debt until one of us was in the ground.

My eyes dropped back to the Cortez file. I'd made Julia a promise early on, when the work was already dark and getting darker: the shadows stayed outside. They didn't cross the threshold. They didn't sit at the dinner table or follow our girls to bed. Cortez would test that promise in ways most cases didn't. If she looked at me and said no, that would be the end of it. I'd walk away from the seven figures, the win, all of it. No hesitation.

I closed the file and pushed it away. Then I opened the drawer where I kept a decanter tucked far enough back that the girls couldn't reach it when they spent the day at the office with me. The bourbon caught the last of the afternoon light as I poured two fingers into a glass.

I was halfway through enjoying the burn when someone knocked. Laurel hadn't called or buzzed me. That narrowed the possibilities considerably.