Page 74 of The Silent Hour

BY THE TIME I DROPPED Lia and the girls at home and kissed their foreheads goodnight, the sun had already drowned behind the ocean.

I hadn't planned on going into the office.

I should've stayed home.

Should've let my wife curl into me.

Should've listened to the girls argue over who cheated at whatever game they'd been playing in the back seat. Should've let the ordinary noise of my life scrape away everything my father had told us.

Instead, I drove straight back into the city and went right back into the belly of it with Rafa, Knox, and Eric.

We tore Cortez's files apart for hours. Notes in three different handwritings covered the conference table. Cross-references glowed beneath yellow and green highlighter. Names, shell companies, dates, properties, and known associates spread across the wall display in connections that almost made sense until one missing piece broke the entire chain.

By two in the morning, we were running on fumes.

Knox had passed out on the leather sofa mid-sentence, one arm thrown over his face, shoes still on and tie loosened around his neck. Eric and Rafa had gone on a Wawa run for shitty sandwiches and coffee strong enough to dissolve tooth enamel.

I'd slept maybe eight hours in the last forty-eight. I tossed my pen onto the table and watched it roll across a stack of photographs before rubbing the back of my neck. Exhaustion had started blurring everything except my father's warning.

Cortez's previous counsel hadn't simply stopped representing him. Two men had been found dead. Others had disappeared. One man's wife had packed a single bag, taken their son out of school on a Tuesday, and vanished four days before her husband did. Whether Cortez had ordered any of it remained something nobody had been able to prove in front of a jury, but the pattern was ugly enough that pretending it didn't exist would've been stupidity, and now he'd come to us.

Then there was Lila. So far, we'd found nothing. Her employment history checked out clean. Education checked out. Case access showed nothing that didn't belong there. There was no secret trail connecting her to Cortez's organization. No suspicious deposits. No convenient gaps in her résumé where someone might've been doing something they didn't want on paper.

Nothing except blood. Dominic Cortez was her biological father. That fact alone wasn't evidence of a fucking thing. I'd spent my entire career defending men whose children had changed their last names, moved across the country, built lives so deliberately ordinary they practically hummed with effort. I wasn't going to decide Lila had inherited criminal intent along with half her DNA simply because it made the puzzle easier to finish.

What bothered me was Cortez implicating her at all. He'd put her name in our mouths.

Told us she knew things. Demanded she work his defense. Then left us to figure out what any of it meant.

I shoved my chair back hard enough that it rolled into the credenza behind me. The sound cracked through the room. I needed air. The rooftop access was several corridors away, past the east wing and the row of dark associate offices, but walking sounded better than sitting there until the words on the page in front of me stopped connecting to anything.

I stepped into the hallway and rolled my shoulders until something in my upper back released. My thoughts drifted to Lia. She'd been quiet on the drive home. Not the sharp quiet of someone choosing not to say something. The deeper kind. The kind that meant she was already three steps ahead, turning something over, looking at it from every angle before she decided what it was.

Her hand had rested on my thigh the whole way. Nails tracing small, absent patterns against the fabric while she watched the city blur past the window. I smiled faintly and passed through the east wing.

Most of the offices were swallowed by darkness, the steady hum of emergency lights casting feeble, bluish-gold halos against the polished glass partitions. The faint hum echoed along the carpeted corridor. Then I saw it—an amber glow pooling beneath one door, like a lantern left burning in a storm.

My stride slowed. Marino. Irritation flared. What was she doing here at two in the morning? I halted outside her office. The door stood slightly ajar, a sliver of light cutting through the shadowy hallway. Julia’s voice rattled in my mind: No closed doors. No being alone with her. Technically, this door wasn’t closed—but that hardly made it a safe bet. I rapped once on the jamb.

“Lila.”

She lifted her head. For a heartbeat I didn’t recognize the woman before me. Her usually immaculate bun had surrendered to gravity; dark waves tumbled around her narrow shoulders. The complexion was streaked with smudged foundation. An open bottle of red wine, its label peeling at the edges, stood sentry beside a half-empty glass. Stains traced her cheeks where tears had carved raw channels; her eyes were puffy and bloodshot.

“Mr. Marcelli,” she whispered, her voice ragged as sandpaper.

I followed her gaze to the bottle. “How much of that did you drink?”

She blinked, as though the wine had evaporated from sight. “Enough.”

“Clearly.” I leaned against the frame, arms crossed against my chest. “Why are you here?”

She let out a hollow laugh that rattled like broken glass. “Because apparently my apartment wasn’t far enough away from Dominic Cortez.”

My pulse hit a sharper beat. “You know—?”

Her gaze snapped back, furious. “That he decided to drag my name into his case? Yeah. I know.” Her lip curled, mascara splitting into rivulets.

“How did you find out?”