Chapter 5
We drove through the night.
Three SUVs, windows blacked out, lights off, weaving through back roads in the middle of the national forest.
I sat in the middle of the second car, Mia asleep on my lap.
Dominic sat next to me, staring out the window, his face a mask.
Sofia was in the front passenger seat, her arm bandaged, talking into a radio every two minutes.
Nobody spoke.
The only sound was the hum of the engine and the wind outside.
An hour before dawn, we pulled up to a small cabin on the edge of a frozen lake.
One story.
Wooden.
No lights.
No security gates.
No guards patrolling the perimeter.
Just trees.
And ice.
And silence.
"This is it?" Sofia said, getting out of the car. "You brought us to a fishing cabin?"
"Lila’s family owned it," Dominic said, grabbing the bags from the trunk. "Nobody knows about it but me. It’s off the grid. No power lines. No cell service. No address. We’ll be safe here for a few days."
We carried the bags inside.
The cabin was small.
Two bedrooms.
A kitchen.
A living room with a stone fireplace.
Dust covered every surface.
But it was warm.
And it felt safe.
For the first time in a week, I breathed easy.
I put Mia down in the crib in the smaller bedroom, covering her with a blanket.
I walked back into the living room.
Dominic was building a fire in the fireplace.
Sofia was cleaning her gun on the kitchen table.
I sat down on the couch, pulling my sweater tighter around me.
"Tell me about the Morettis," I said.
Dominic didn’t look up from the fire.
"What do you want to know?"
"Everything."
He struck a match.
The fire caught, spreading across the logs, casting golden light across the room.
He sat down in the armchair across from me, his elbows on his knees.
"Vito Moretti is the boss," he said. "He’s 78. Dying of lung cancer. Doctors say he has six months, max. He’s spent his whole life building his empire. And he’s not going to die quietly. He wants to take my family with him. He wants to leave his kids a world where the Walkers don’t exist anymore."
He paused.
"Lila was the first target. She was smart. She was brave. She got a job at one of Vito’s front companies, working in the accounting department. Over six months, she copied every file. Every transaction. Every name of every cop, every judge, every politician on their payroll. She had enough evidence to put Vito and his entire family in prison for the rest of their lives."
"Where is the evidence now?" I said.
Dominic’s jaw tightened.
"She hid it. She told me she’d hidden it somewhere safe, somewhere nobody would ever think to look. She was going to turn it over to the FBI the day she died. We searched the house. Her car. Her office. We never found it."
The room went quiet.
A thought hit me.
A cold, terrible thought.
I pulled my wallet from my pocket.
I opened it.
Pulled out the photo of Mark and the boys.
Turned it over.
Written on the back, in Mark’s messy handwriting, was a string of numbers and letters.
I’d stared at it a hundred times since he died.
I’d thought it was a work order number.
A case file.
Something meaningless.
Now I knew.
My hands shook.
I held the photo out to Dominic.
"What does this look like to you?"
He took the photo.
His eyes scanned the back.
His face went white.
"It’s a location code," he said. "For a storage unit. Chicago. The kind of unit you rent with a fake name, no ID, no security cameras. Lila used the same system to hide her backup files."
He looked up at me.
"Where did you get this?"
"Mark wrote it," I said. "On the back of our family photo. The day before he died."
The pieces clicked into place.
Mark was investigating the Morettis.
Lila was investigating the Morettis.
They’d found each other.
They’d worked together.
They’d hidden the evidence in the same place.
And then the Morettis had killed them both.
Sofia stood up, her gun forgotten on the table.
"You know what this means," she said. "The evidence isn’t gone. It’s in Chicago. In that storage unit. If we get it? We can take Vito down. All of them. The entire family. Every last one."
Dominic stood, pacing the room.
"It’s a trap," he said. "Vito knows we’re looking for those files. He’s probably had that storage unit staked out for months. We step foot in Chicago? We’re dead before we open the door."
"We don’t have a choice," I said, standing up. "My husband died for those files. Your wife died for those files. If we let them sit there and rot? Their deaths meant nothing. Mia will spend the rest of her life running. I’ll spend the rest of my life running. Is that what you want for her?"
I pointed at the bedroom door.
"She’s three months old, Dominic. She deserves a life. A real life. Not hiding in cabins and fortresses, scared every time a car drives down the road. Those files are the only way we get that for her. The only way we get justice for Mark and Lila."
Dominic stopped pacing.
He looked at me.
The firelight danced in his eyes.
"You’re asking me to walk into the lion’s den," he said.
"I’m asking you to fight," I said. "For your daughter. For your wife. For my family. Are you going to do it? Or are you going to keep hiding?"
For a long second, he didn’t answer.
Then he pulled his phone from his pocket.
He dialed a number.
Put it on speaker.
A man’s voice answered.
"Walker."
"Jax," Dominic said. "I need a team in Chicago. Five men. The best you’ve got. Untraceable cars. Fake IDs. Everything. We’re coming for the files."
The man on the other end swore.
"You’re insane. Vito’s got half the city looking for you."
"I know," Dominic said. "That’s why we’re going to win. He’ll never expect us to walk right through his front door."
He hung up.
He looked at me.
"We leave for Chicago at dawn," he said. "But you’re not coming."
"Like hell I’m not," I said. "That’s my husband’s code. That’s my family’s justice. I’m going. And if you try to stop me? I’ll walk to Chicago myself."
Sofia laughed.
A short, sharp sound.
"I like her," she said.
Dominic ran a hand through his hair.
He looked at the bedroom door.
At Mia.
Then he looked back at me.
"Fine," he said. "You come. But you do exactly what I say. When I say run, you run. When I say hide, you hide. If I tell you to leave me behind and save Mia? You do it. No arguments. No hesitation. Do you understand?"
I nodded.
May you like
"I understand."
"Good." He sat back down in the armchair. "Get some sleep. We’ve got a long drive tomorrow. And when we get to Chicago? We’re not just fighting for the files. We’re fighting for every person the Morettis ever killed. And we don’t stop until Vito Moretti is breathing his last breath."
