Chapter 2 - The Second Wolf.
Mateo reached the control panel and entered a security override.
Nothing happened.
The elevator kept climbing.
"That's impossible," he said.
Sebastian watched the floor number blink.
"Apparently not."
Mateo drew his sidearm but kept it pointed at the floor.
Clara tightened both arms around Emma.
"There is another exit, right?"
"Two," Sebastian said.
"One is a service stairwell. The other is a panic corridor behind the library wall."
Mateo looked sharply at him.
"The corridor was removed during the renovation."
"No. I told the contractors to wall off the entrance and leave the passage intact."
Mateo almost smiled.
"For once, your trust issues are useful."
Sebastian crossed to a floor-to-ceiling bookcase and pressed a hidden latch behind a bronze sculpture.
A narrow panel opened soundlessly.
The elevator chimed.
Emma flinched.
It was the first visible sign of fear Sebastian had seen from her.
"Go," he told Clara.
Clara shook her head.
"Not without you."
"You came here because Luca thought I could protect you. Let me start by doing that."
The elevator doors began to separate.
Mateo positioned himself behind the desk.
Sebastian pushed Clara gently toward the opening in the wall.
"Take Emma inside."
Clara pulled Emma through the panel.
Sebastian followed just as Mateo called out.
"Security clearance. Identify yourself."
A man's voice answered from the office.
"Corporate facilities. We have an alarm on the ventilation system."
Mateo laughed without humor.
"Facilities doesn't carry suppressed pistols."
The first impact sounded like a heavy book striking a wall.
Then came another.
Sebastian stopped in the dark corridor.
Clara grabbed his sleeve.
"What was that?"
"Stay with Emma."
"Sebastian."
"Stay with her."
He opened the panel less than an inch.
Two men in gray maintenance jackets had entered the office.
One lay facedown near the elevator.
Mateo had the second pinned against the glass desk.
A compact pistol had slid across the floor.
Sebastian stepped back into the room.
"Alive," he said.
Mateo twisted the man's wrist harder.
"That was the plan."
The intruder stared at Sebastian with flat professional eyes.
"Who sent you?" Sebastian asked.
The man said nothing.
Mateo searched his pockets.
No wallet.
No phone.
No company identification.
Only a plastic access card with no markings.
Sebastian picked it up by the edges.
"Can it be traced?"
Mateo nodded.
"If the logs haven't been scrubbed."
Clara appeared at the hidden doorway despite Sebastian's order.
Emma stood behind her.
The intruder saw the child.
Something changed in his expression.
Recognition.
Mateo photographed the wolf patterns from six different angles before allowing Clara to lower her sleeve.
He wanted a record that could survive claims the coordinates had been reconstructed later.
Clara watched him work with impatient fascination.
"Luca would have hated you."
Mateo looked up.
"Why?"
"Because you document everything."
Sebastian answered for her.
"Luca hated documentation until he needed to prove someone else was lying."
Clara considered that.
"Then he would have hated you for ten minutes and hired you afterward."
Mateo nodded.
"I'll accept that."
The small exchange eased the pressure just enough for Emma to move closer to the adults.
She touched the edge of Sebastian's signet ring.
"The wolf looks lonely."
Sebastian looked at the engraving.
For the first time, he realized it did.
It lasted less than a second.
Clara saw it too.
"He knows her."
Sebastian moved in front of Emma.
"How?"
The man looked down.
Mateo pressed him harder against the desk.
"Answer him."
The man finally spoke.
"You're already too late."
The emergency lights died.
The room went black.
Emma gasped.
Sebastian heard the struggle before he could see it.
A chair overturned.
Mateo cursed.
Then the lights returned on backup power.
The intruder was unconscious on the floor.
The second man remained motionless near the elevator.
Mateo held his own shoulder, breathing hard.
"He had a capsule in his sleeve," he said.
"What kind of capsule?"
"Sedative, maybe worse. He tried to bite it. I stopped him."
Sebastian looked at Clara.
"This is no longer a conversation."
Clara gave a bitter laugh.
"It stopped being a conversation thirteen years ago."
Mateo ordered a trusted security team to secure the floor through a private encrypted channel.
He did not use the building system.
While he worked, Sebastian returned to Clara.
"The tattoo."
She looked at him cautiously.
"What about it?"
"You said Luca drew the second half himself."
Clara nodded.
"Show me again."
She rolled up her sleeve.
Sebastian approached without touching her.
The wolf looked ordinary at first glance, but Luca had never drawn anything without hiding another meaning inside it.
Sebastian remembered two wolves on the cover of an old notebook from boarding school.
One had faced east.
The other had faced west.
He opened a drawer in his desk and removed a slim black case.
Inside was a silver signet ring bearing the Vale crest.
He turned the ring over.
A wolf had been engraved inside the band.
Clara stared.
"That's the other one."
Sebastian placed the ring beside her forearm.
The two designs were not identical.
They were complementary.
The negative space between the engraved wolf and the tattoo formed a sequence of shapes.
Mateo returned and saw what Sebastian was doing.
"Numbers?"
"Coordinates," Sebastian said.
Clara's face tightened.
"Coordinates to what?"
Sebastian photographed the two wolves together and enlarged the image on his tablet.
The shapes resolved into eight digits separated by a slash.
Mateo entered them into a secure map application.
A location appeared in Boston's Back Bay.
Clara stared at the screen.
"That's two blocks from my old apartment."
Sebastian looked at her.
"Did Luca ever take you there?"
"No."
Emma edged closer.
Mateo ordered the trusted officers arriving upstairs to surrender their personal phones before entering the penthouse.
He sealed the devices inside a metal evidence pouch and made each officer repeat the verbal challenge code chosen only minutes earlier.
Clara noticed everything.
"You don't trust your own people."
Mateo checked the unconscious intruder's pulse.
"I trust individuals. I don't trust systems that tell me who individuals are."
Sebastian glanced at him.
That distinction had become the only reason they were still alive.
Emma wandered to the far side of the hidden panel and studied the narrow corridor with open curiosity.
"Was this for spies?"
Sebastian crouched beside her.
"Mostly for rich people who didn't want to use the normal hallway."
Emma considered that explanation.
"That's sillier."
Clara gave Sebastian the first genuine smile he had seen from her.
It disappeared almost immediately when Mateo found a tiny adhesive transmitter beneath the intruder's collar.
The device had no visible markings.
It was broadcasting on a frequency used by Vale executive security.
Mateo crushed the transmitter beneath his shoe.
"They weren't just sent here. Someone was listening to the response."
Sebastian looked at the elevator camera.
Every layer of protection he had once considered excessive now seemed embarrassingly thin.
"That's the door."
All three adults turned toward her.
Sebastian crouched slightly.
"What door?"
Emma opened her sketchbook.
The page she had been covering with heavy black lines was not random.
Beneath the dark strokes, a rectangular shape appeared, surrounded by a pattern of small squares.
It looked like a doorway set into brick.
Clara frowned.
"Sweetheart, where did you see that?"
Emma shrugged.
"In the wolf book."
Clara went completely still.
"What wolf book?"
Emma looked confused by the question.
"The one in your closet."
Clara's mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Sebastian stood.
"You have a book from Luca?"
"I have a sealed package he left for Emma," Clara said.
"He told me not to open it until she turned six."
Sebastian's pulse accelerated.
"Did you open it?"
"No."
Emma looked down guiltily.
Clara closed her eyes.
"But apparently she did."
Emma hugged the sketchbook to her chest.
"It wasn't sealed anymore."
"Where is it now?" Sebastian asked.
Clara answered before Emma could.
"In our hotel room."
Mateo swore quietly.
Sebastian looked toward the unconscious men on his office floor.
"Which hotel?"
Clara named a small boutique hotel twenty blocks away.
Mateo was already typing on his phone.
His face changed.
"What?" Sebastian demanded.
Mateo turned the screen toward them.
A city fire alert had been issued eight minutes earlier.
The address belonged to Clara's hotel.
Clara gripped Emma's shoulders.
"No."
The alert listed smoke on the ninth floor.
Their room was on the ninth floor.
Sebastian looked at the wolf coordinates again.
Then at the black sketchbook in Emma's hands.
Someone was not merely tracking Clara.
Someone was destroying Luca's trail in real time.
"We're going to Boston," Sebastian said.
Mateo stared at him.
"Tonight?"
"Now."
Clara shook her head.
"The book is here in New York."
Sebastian looked at the fire alert.
"Not anymore."
Emma quietly pulled a folded page from the back pocket of her sketchbook.
"I took this out first."
Clara stared at her daughter.
Emma unfolded the paper.
A hand-drawn wolf appeared at the top.
May you like
Below it, in Luca's unmistakable handwriting, were six words.
WHEN SHE TURNS SIX, FIND SEBASTIAN.
