Page 7 of Cold Mercy

Grace nods, satisfied. “Good. Finish it.”

She leaves the car, and the silence rushes back in. I don’t hate Sophia Moreau because hate is personal. This is simply disposal. She is a cancer in this city, and I am the surgeon.

✽✽✽

My apartment is only a pit stop between the briefing and the hunt. Sixty square meters, one bedroom, one chair I never sit in. Three miles from the Mercer and Moreau house. From here, I have about a ninety-minute drive to James Calloway's company, where I spent the last two years pretending to be his IT specialist.

Inside smells like nothing. It's my fault because I don't even have a cactus here, let alone another person.

I stand before the evidence board in my bedroom. It is the only decoration I allow myself. Photos of Noah Mercer, dead for almost two years, sit beside surveillance shots of Elijah Sterling, the man who controls the entire city from the shadows yet remains out of our reach. He is a ghost, the invisible architect behind the city's underground crime and its legitimate facades, but on paper, he is cleaner than a saint. We know he pulls the strings, but every trail we follow ends in a dead end. And between them, connecting the dead lover to the living kingpin, is Moreau.

Since we can't strike the head, we have to dismantle the body piece by piece, hunting down his lieutenants, hoping that one of them will finally crack.

That's why we are watching Sophia Moreau.

The official narrative paints her as a tragic figure who threw herself into work to survive a devastating loss, but the financials tell a different story. Since Mercer took a bullet to the chest that summer night, Aurora’s revenue has tripled. The laundering became cleaner, sharper, and more efficient.

Mercer was brilliant, but he got too comfortable in the spotlight. He forgot that visibility is a liability. Sophia Moreau is a ghost who moves thousands without leaving a fingerprint. She sold most of the shared holdings, and started hiding from people. That is not grief to me. That is operational discipline with a pretty face.

I run through the file in my head one more time. Sophia, now twenty-three, dead fiancé, Mercer and Moreau Analytics with the clean tagline and the dirty potential, a franchise network that could wash a billion with a bounce rate. They’d been profiled in Forbes, quoted in Business Insider, and listed in Crain’s New York Business ‘20 Under 30’.

There is always a thin line between creativity and theft, and I have watched enough people cross it with a smile to know what it looks like.

I grab my leather jacket, which feels too heavy for this weather but pairs perfectly with the Glock 19 tucked at the back of my waistband.

I check the magazine out of habit and slide it home before heading out. I never walk into a situation unarmed, especially when I am about to step into hostile ground.

Leaving the Mustang three blocks from Howard, I walk the rest. The entrance is a shabby green door in a back alley. I knock twice.

The bouncer opens the door and looks at me like I murdered someone he loved in another life.

“Name,” he says, flat and immediate.

“Thomas Reed.” I had barely finished speaking, and yet he let me in without a search.

Inside does not match the outside. It never does with places like this. Chic lighting, polished wood. Money lives here, even if it pretends not to. On the far wall, a set of stairs leads up to a glass room with a one-way mirror. Observation without accountability. I take one slow look, and walk towards the lodge.

James and Elizabeth have a box on the lower level. He has that good-man posture that tries to make space for someone else’s worry. She is working to keep her makeup from ruining. When she sees me, she waves me over and finds a smile.

“Are we early, or is she late?” I ask, slipping into the role.

“We asked you to come a little earlier,” Elizabeth says. “I wanted to talk to you first. About Sophia.”

James slides his hand over hers, steadying her without drawing attention to it.

“We owe you a heads up.”

I nod and wait, keeping my expression open and interested while internally cataloging every word.

“Please be patient with her,” Elizabeth continues. “She didn't have an easy childhood…she lost her mother and stepfather in a fire on her eighteenth birthday, and Noah was the last one standing for her…and then he died 3 years after her family....”

Elizabeth stops for a moment before she forces herself to continue.

“She shut everyone out. No holidays. No birthdays. We haven’t seen her since the funeral.” Her voice wavers.

“The last memory I have of her is a scream I can’t forget. They were supposed to get married a few months after his death. I feel guilty, and I know I shouldn’t.”

Performance. She pushed them away to keep them clean. Isolation is the first rule when you start working for men like Sterling. You don't bring civilians into a war zone.