All Chapters of Black Suit and Broken Oath: Chapter 21 - Chapter 23

The reply comes eleven minutes later.A second text from the same unknown number. This time not four words. This time an address, a floor number, and a time.The address is Ruiz Tower.The floor is the forty-first.The time is eleven one hour before the meeting Nadia told Carr about. One hour before Ruiz expects them."She wants to meet us before we go in," Francesco says."She wants to give us something before we go in," Alexandra says. "Information. Access. Something we need that she has been holding for a very long time." She sets the phone down. "The ledger is in that building. She knows exactly where. She is the only person alive who does.""It could be a trap," Nadia says."Everything about today is a trap," Alexandra says. "The question is who is doing the trapping."They move at ten.Marco stays behind. He argues about this, and Alexandra ends the argument in one sentence, spoken quietly, with the weight of someone who has made a decision and will not unmake it. He sits back d

Alexandra does not move for a long time.She stands in the middle of the conference room on the forty-first floor, looking at the phone screen, at Francesco's face on it, and does not move or speak, and the stillness of her is not the stillness of someone calm. It is the stillness of someone who is holding something enormous inside themselves and has not yet decided what to do with it.Nadia keeps her weapon on Ruiz.Ruiz waits. He is good at waiting. That much is clear. He has the patience of a man who has spent decades playing games measured in years rather than minutes and he is content to let this moment breathe because he believes he controls the outcome of it.He is wrong about that."How long?" Alexandra asks. She is still looking at the screen.Ruiz understands the question. "Francesco came to me eight months ago. Not willingly. I had something he wanted to protect. A debt from before your time as head of this organization. Something your father knew about and chose to look pa