Chapter 8: Before Dawn

Declan's POV

I left her asleep at four, with the sheet over one shoulder and her hair across my pillow.

If she had opened her eyes I would have stayed, and three families would have woken up with Falzone's men in their kitchens.

My phone had gone off at 3:40.

It was my captain with the hearing aid, calling from a car outside Berwyn.

"Renato's put two men on each of the old capos' houses," he said. "Wives, grandkids, a dog. Nobody's touched them yet."

"Yet."

"He's waiting for the old men to come home and kneel."

I dressed in the dark.

I asked the hotel for a car and woke the two men outside the door.

"She doesn't leave this suite," I told them. "If she wants coffee, she gets coffee. If she wants a gun, you ask me first."

"And if she wants out?"

"Then you open the door and walk her wherever she's going," I said. "She's not a prisoner. She's the reason we're here."

I wrote the note in the hallway on the back of a room-service card.

Then I knocked on Maeve's door three floors down and made her copy it out.

I could not trust my own writing.

My hand was still shaking.

The first house was a brick bungalow in Berwyn, with a plastic Virgin Mary in the yard.

Two of Renato's soldiers sat in a parked Buick at the curb, eating hot dogs.

I walked up to the driver's window and knocked on the glass.

He rolled it down and went white around the mouth.

"I'm Declan Harrigan," I said. "You know my face from the file in your boss's desk."

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