The Seven Sins: Cross Reckoning

Chapter 5:The Meeting Place

The parking garage was three levels underground, and Silas heard the footsteps behind him before he saw them, quick, uneven, someone trying to close distance without breaking into a run.

He didn't turn around. He let his hand drift toward the gun at his waist instead, fingers loose, ready, and kept walking toward the pillar the voice on the phone had named as a meeting point, counting the footsteps behind him by their rhythm alone.

"Cross."

He turned then, fast, and found not an attacker but a woman, mid-thirties maybe, dark coat pulled tight against the concrete cold, her breath coming quick and visible in the garage's dim light. She stopped six feet from him, hands visible, palms out, the universal signal of someone who understood exactly how dangerous the man in front of her could be.

"You're not who I was told to expect," Silas said.

"The call was mine. I just didn't want to say who I was over a line that might not have been as private as I needed it to be." She lowered her hands slowly. "My name is Naomi Reyes."

Reyes, standing a few feet behind Silas, made a small, sharp sound of surprise.

"You know her?" Silas asked, without looking back.

"She's my niece," Reyes said, his voice tight with something between confusion and alarm. "Naomi, what the hell are you doing down here, how do you even know about any of this."

"Because I worked for Jonathan Cross for three years," Naomi said, and the words landed in the garage like a dropped weight. "Before he died. As his personal archivist. He trusted almost no one with his private records, uncle, you know that better than anyone, but he trusted me. And two days before the vote happened, he gave me something to keep safe."

Silas's whole body went still in the way Reyes had learned to recognize, the calm that meant everything underneath it was moving very fast.

"You have the document," Silas said.

"I have a copy." Naomi's eyes flicked past him, scanning the garage the way someone did when they'd spent the last two days looking over their shoulder. "The original's somewhere else, somewhere even I don't know, he was careful like that, always splitting things up so no one piece could hurt him alone. But the copy has enough. Names. Dates. His own suspicions about who'd turn on him first."

"Then give it to me."

"Not here." She shook her head, quick and certain. "Not in the open like this. Whoever tried to silence Rosalind Hart tonight, they'll be looking for anyone connected to your father who's still breathing, and if they see us together in a parking garage at midnight, that's a death sentence for both of us before sunrise."

"Then where."

Naomi hesitated, and in that hesitation Silas heard exactly how much this was costing her, the fear underneath the composure, and something in him almost respected her more for showing it instead of pretending it wasn't there.

"There's a place," she said finally. "A safehouse your father kept, off any of the Assembly's books. Nobody alive knows about it except me and maybe one other person. I can take you there tonight, hand over what I have, and after that you and I are done, do you understand me? I have a daughter. I can't be part of whatever you're about to do to those seven people."

"Fair," Silas said. "Take me there."

She turned to lead the way toward a car parked in the far corner of the garage, and Silas fell into step behind her, Reyes at his other side, his hand still resting near his weapon out of pure habit now rather than immediate threat. They were halfway across the concrete floor when Naomi's phone buzzed once in her coat pocket, and she pulled it out to check it without breaking stride.

Her steps slowed. Then stopped completely.

"What," Silas said.

She turned the screen toward him without a word, and Silas looked down at a text message from a contact saved simply as Dad, sent four minutes ago.

They know about you. Get somewhere safe. Do NOT go to the house. Call me the second you see this.

"That's not my father," Naomi said, her voice gone thin and unsteady. "My father's been dead six years. I don't know who's sending this."

Silas's eyes lifted from the phone to the garage around them, to the shadows between the parked cars, to the exit ramps at either end of the level, and every instinct he'd built over two decades of surviving rooms exactly like this one told him the same thing at once.

"Get down," he said, and grabbed Naomi by the arm, pulling her behind the nearest pillar half a second before the first gunshot cracked through the concrete silence and sparked off the wall where she'd been standing.