The basement of the Blackwood Trust was a subterranean purgatory where the air was recycled through filters as old as the city's corruption. It was a tomb for the wealthy, a place where the living came to bury the evidence of their greed. Sarafina walked through the corridors of reinforced steel, the sound of her footsteps swallowed by the heavy, sound dampening carpet.
Arthur's tip had been a frantic, whispered thing, delivered in the back of a parked car while the rain hammered against the roof. He had given her a name, Thomas Vane, and a sequence of numbers that felt like a death sentence. Her father had lived a double life, and it appeared he had died a double death, leaving behind a legacy that was beginning to look more like a criminal dossier than a career of service.
The clerk at the front had barely looked at the forged identification Sarafina presented. In this part of the city, the only thing that mattered was the possession of the key.
The private vault room was a small, windowless box of fluorescent light and stainless steel. Sarafina sat at the narrow table, the safety deposit box resting before her like a heavy, metal heart. Her fingers were cold as she slid the silver key into the lock. It turned with a smooth, oiled click that echoed with the weight of twenty years of secrets.
She expected the predictable. She expected stacks of non sequential hundreds, perhaps a ledger of names and payoffs, or a cache of narcotics that would confirm her father's fall from grace.
She lifted the lid.
The box contained no money. No drugs. No ledger.
Instead, it was filled with a stack of high gloss photographs, their edges slightly yellowed by the passage of time. Sarafina pulled the first one out, her breath hitching in her throat.
It was Joseph Mcwell.
He looked younger, perhaps in his early thirties, the sharp edges of his face not yet fully hardened by the absolute power he now wielded. He was standing on a sun drenched pier, his arm draped possessively around a woman who looked like a creature made of light. She was beautiful, with wide, laughing eyes and hair that caught the gold of the sunset. She was also heavily pregnant, her hand resting over her swell in a gesture of primal protection.
Sarafina flipped through the others with a trembling hand. They were candid shots, the kind taken by someone who was watching from a distance, someone who was not a part of the moment but was obsessed with documenting it. Joseph was laughing in one, a sight Sarafina found nearly impossible to reconcile with the cold, calculating man who had haunted her apartment.
The realization hit her with the force of a physical blow. These weren't crime scene photos. This wasn't surveillance of a criminal enterprise. These were the records of a life her father had been tasked with protecting. Or perhaps, more accurately, a life her father had used as a leash.
Stephen Cole hadn't just been Joseph's partner in the shadow world. He had been his keeper. He had held the most intimate pieces of Joseph's vulnerability in this metal box, using the man's heart to control the man's empire.
"You were never supposed to see those, Little Bird."
The voice was a low, velvet rasp that seemed to emerge from the very walls of the vault. Sarafina didn't jump. She didn't reach for her weapon. The sudden, suffocating scent of sandalwood and expensive tobacco had already announced his arrival, wrapping around her like an invisible shroud.
She heard the heavy vault door creak on its hinges, the sound of the locking mechanism sliding home. The silence that followed was absolute, a weighted pressure that made the small room feel like a diving bell at the bottom of the ocean.
Sarafina remained seated, her eyes fixed on the photograph of the pregnant woman. She felt Joseph's presence behind her, a wall of heat and lethal authority that seemed to pull the oxygen from the air.
"Who is she?" Sarafina asked, her voice sounding steady despite the frantic thrumming of her pulse.
"She was the only thing in this world that didn't have a price," Joseph replied.
He moved closer, his hand coming to rest on the back of her chair. Sarafina could feel the vibration of his breathing, a rhythmic, predatory sound that made the fine hairs on her neck stand up. He reached over her shoulder, his long, elegant fingers plucking the photograph from her hand.
"Your father was a master of the long game," Joseph murmured, his voice dropping into a register of weary, dangerous intimacy. "He knew that a man with nothing to lose is a man who cannot be controlled. So he made sure I always had something at stake. He didn't just walk the thin blue line, Sarafina. He lived in the mud beneath it."
Sarafina finally turned her head, her gaze meeting his. Up close, Joseph's eyes were a tempest of steel and shadow, reflecting a degree of pain that made her chest ache with a sudden, unwanted empathy.
"Is she why you killed him?" she whispered.
Joseph leaned down, his face inches from hers. The intensity of his gaze was a physical weight, a demand for her total attention.
"I am tired of the letters, Sarafina. I am tired of the distance."
He reached out, his thumb tracing the sharp line of her jaw with a possessive, slow deliberate motion. The touch was a spark of fire against her skin, a terrifying contrast to the coldness of the vault.
"Your father died because he tried to trade your safety for the ledger," Joseph said, his voice a lethal promise. "He thought he could use me to buy you a clean life. He forgot that once you enter the dark, the light doesn't want you back."
He straightened up, his hand sliding from her jaw to the nape of her neck, his fingers tangling in her hair with a firm, territorial grip. He forced her to look at the empty safety deposit box, at the hollow remains of her father's secret life.
"The photos stay here," Joseph commanded. "The girl you were stays here. From this moment on, you don't answer to a badge or a memory. You answer to me."
Sarafina felt the pull of the abyss, the seductive invitation to stop fighting the current and let the shadows consume her. She looked at the man who was both her father's killer and her only source of truth, and she realized that the cage was no longer the police force or the apartment.
The cage was him.
He leaned in again, his lips brushing against the shell of her ear as the lights in the vault began to flicker, the power being cut from the outside.
"Do you hear that, Sarafina?" he whispered into the darkness.
"Hear what?"
"The sound of the door locking from the outside," Joseph murmured. "We aren't alone in this building, and the men coming down those stairs aren't mine. It seems your father had more than one safety deposit box, and more than one person who wants what's inside."
Sarafina felt her blood turn to ice as the muffled sound of a rhythmic, heavy thud echoed through the steel walls. The hunt hadn't ended at the grave. It was only just beginning.