Chapter 2 - The Girl in the Red Scarf
Mara ran until her lungs burned.
Snow lashed her face as she cut across Blackwater Avenue, ignoring the traffic lights, the horns, the slick black ice beneath her boots. Her phone stayed pressed to her ear, ringing Emma’s emergency phone again and again.
Nothing.
The after-school center was already dark when Mara reached it. A single security light shone over the locked glass doors. Through the window, she could see tiny chairs, paper snowflakes, and a forgotten purple mitten on the floor.
Mrs. Donnelly, the center director, opened the door after Mara pounded on it hard enough to hurt her hands.
“Mara?” The older woman’s eyes widened. “What happened to your face?”
“Emma. Tell me exactly what happened.”
Mrs. Donnelly swallowed. “She said you had called.”
“I didn’t.”
“She said you were waiting at home because of the storm. She seemed… calm. She had her red scarf on.”
Mara felt the world tilt.
“Did anyone come for her?”
“No. She left alone. I assumed…” Mrs. Donnelly’s face crumpled. “Oh God. I assumed she knew what she was doing.”
Emma was seven. She knew how to count tips in the hotel cash drawer. She knew which canned soup was cheapest at the corner store. She knew not to talk to strangers.
But she was still seven.
Mara left before Mrs. Donnelly could call the police. The men in the alley had mentioned Emma. If Mara called the police, whoever had taken her daughter might decide she was more valuable dead than alive.
She ran toward home.
The six blocks between the center and their apartment became a maze of white streets and shuttered storefronts. The snowstorm had swallowed the city whole. Cars crawled through intersections. Buses stood abandoned at curbsides. Every passing stranger made Mara’s heart stop.
Then she saw it.
A small red scarf tied around the iron fence outside Saint Jude’s Church.
Emma’s scarf.
Mara grabbed it with shaking hands.
Pinned beneath it was a folded note.
COME ALONE. BLACKWATER GRAND. SERVICE ENTRANCE.
No signature.
No explanation.
Mara stared at the words until the ink blurred through her tears.
Then headlights swept across the street.
A black sedan skidded around the corner too fast. It slammed into a parked delivery truck with a scream of metal. Steam poured from the hood.
Mara stepped back instinctively.
The rear door opened.
A little girl stumbled out.
“Mommy!”
Emma ran through knee-deep snow, sobbing, her coat half-buttoned and her dark curls covered in white.
Mara dropped to her knees and caught her.
“Emma. Emma, baby, are you hurt?”
“They put me in a car,” Emma cried into her neck. “But the driver got scared. He said there were men following us.”
Mara held her so tightly Emma whimpered.
“Where are they?” Mara asked.
Emma pointed toward the sedan.
The driver’s door was open. A man lay slumped behind the wheel, blood soaking his gray suit. He was dead.
In the back seat, another man was alive.
Barely.
He was older than Mara had expected a powerful man to be—not old exactly, but worn. His silver hair was dark with snow. Blood spread across his white shirt beneath an expensive charcoal coat. One hand clutched his side.
The other held a gun.
When Mara looked into the car, he raised it toward her.
“Don’t move,” he rasped.
Emma clung to Mara’s leg.
“Mommy, he helped me.”
The man’s eyes flicked toward the girl. Something in his expression changed, almost imperceptibly.
“He was going to crash,” Emma said. “So I grabbed the wheel.”
Mara looked at her daughter.
“You what?”
“He told me to.” Emma’s small face twisted with fear. “He said if I didn’t, the bad men would catch us.”
The injured man lowered the gun by an inch.
“Your daughter saved our lives,” he said.
“Who are you?”
Before he could answer, another set of headlights appeared at the end of the street.
Three black SUVs.
The man in the sedan looked at them, then at Mara.
His voice dropped.
“If they find me, they will kill your daughter too.”
Mara’s stomach turned cold.
“Why?”
“Because they already know she saw them.”
The SUVs accelerated.
The man held out a blood-covered key.
“Drive.”
Mara stared at him.
“I don’t know you.”
“You don’t have to.” His eyes were steel despite the pain. “But if you want your daughter alive, get in the car.”
The vehicles were coming closer.
Emma whispered, “Mommy…”
Mara had spent four years surviving one bill at a time. She had learned that fear did not disappear when you needed courage. It simply became something you carried.
She took the key.
“Emma,” she said, opening the front passenger door, “you sit down, lock the door, and do not open it for anyone except me.”
Her daughter nodded.
Mara slid behind the wheel.
The injured stranger leaned back against the leather seat, blood dripping through his fingers.
“Can you drive?” he asked.
“No.”
He gave the faintest smile.
“Tonight, Mrs. Hayes, you can.”
The SUVs turned onto the street behind them.
Mara shoved the car into gear and hit the gas.
The sedan spun on the ice.
Emma screamed.
Mara gripped the wheel, her heart pounding so hard it felt like it might break through her ribs. Snow blinded the windshield. The city blurred into ghostly lights and dark corners.
Behind them, the black SUVs followed.
The injured man reached forward and pressed a button on the dashboard. A hidden compartment opened, revealing a second phone.
“Call the number marked V.”
Mara did.
A man answered on the first ring.
“Mr. Voss?”
“Your boss is bleeding in my backseat,” Mara said. “And someone is trying to kill us.”
Silence.
Then the voice became deadly calm.
“Who is this?”
“Mara Hayes.”
The stranger in the back seat looked sharply at her.
On the phone, the man said, “Mrs. Hayes, take the bridge tunnel. Do not stop. Do not let them box you in.”
Mara looked into the rearview mirror.
The wounded man’s gaze locked with hers.
“You know my name,” she said.
His mouth tightened.
“Yes.”
“Who are you?”
The man looked out at the storm, at the black vehicles gaining behind them.
“My name is Dominic Varela.”
Mara had heard that name before.
Everyone in Blackwater had.
Dominic Varela was not merely rich. He was not merely powerful. He was the man whose name people lowered their voices to say.
The king of Blackwater’s criminal underworld.
May you like
And he was dying in the backseat of her car.
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