Chapter 6 - THE LATIN INSCRIPTION
The silver medallion felt ice-cold against my fingertips.
Custos Memoriae.
Keeper of the Memory.
It wasn't just a random trinket or a custom pet tag. It was a crest—the private insignia of an underground network of power brokers and fixers who operated in the dead spaces between the police, the politicians, and the mafia. And Jared Kensington wasn't just an independent billionaire ruling the New York waterfront; he was tied directly to the same shadowy syndicate I had barely escaped.
My hands began to tremble. The quiet, safe bubble I had constructed around my life in Brooklyn over the past three years suddenly felt like tissue paper standing in the path of a hurricane.
Why did Jared’s dog wear that crest?
What kind of game had I walked into when Miles Drummond dropped one hundred thousand dollars on the counter of my clinic?
Before I could process the terrifying implications, the heavy oak door of the west wing swung open.
Jared stood in the doorway. His overcoat was gone, his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and his knuckles were bruised and stained with a faint smear of dark blood.
He took one look at my pale face, and then his eyes dropped to my hand, which was still resting on the silver medallion half-hidden in Atlas’s fur.
The air in the room froze solid.
Jared didn't shout. He didn't rush across the room. He simply closed the door behind him and locked it with a sharp, metallic click.
“You found it,” Jared said quietly, his voice dangerously low.
I slowly pulled my hand away from the dog as if I had been burned. I stood up, backing away until the edge of the medical cart pressed against my lower back.
“Who are you?” I demanded, my voice shaking despite my best efforts to keep it steady. “What is this dog to you, Mr. Kensington? And what does your crest have to do with the people I spent the last three years hiding from?”
Jared didn't flinch. He walked slowly toward me, stopping a few feet away, his gray eyes searching my face with a terrifying intensity.
“You think Miles found you by accident tonight, Willa?” Jared asked softly.
The room seemed to spin.
“What are you talking about?”
“There are no accidents in New York,” Jared said, resting his hands lightly on the back of a chair. “Especially not when it comes to the people who understand broken things.”
He reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, sliding it across the metal tray toward me.
With trembling fingers, I unfolded it.
It wasn't a contract. It wasn't a background check.
It was a photograph of me—taken three months ago outside my apartment building in Brooklyn, standing under the flickering streetlamp with a stray cat in my arms. And stamped in the bottom corner of the photo was the exact same Latin crest: Custos Memoriae.
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“You brought me here on purpose,” I whispered, a cold wave of fury and terror washing over me. “The hundred thousand dollars... the sick dog... it was all a trap to draw me out.”
“It wasn't a trap,” Jared corrected calmly. “It was an invitation. Because the men who are coming for you—the ones who tracked that car to my gates tonight—won't stop until they find the ledger you took when you left Chicago.”
