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“The important thing is I won’t be going there again anytime soon.”

“You have somewhere else to be?” He asks, raising a curious eyebrow at me. “You looked mighty comfortable back there.”

“Until I wasn’t,” I remind him. I shudder when I think about what could have happened had he not come along and intercepted the attack back at the service station. “Why did you help me back there?”

“It was the right thing to do.”

“Not many people do the right thing anymore.”

“I’m not many people.”

No, he isn’t. Dante isn’t like anyone I’ve come across before. But maybe that’s because I’ve led such a sheltered life. You wouldn’t know it, to find me in the club playing poker. But that is one thing I insist on, the one thing I can never let go of, which is the one thing I am extraordinarily gifted at – playing poker. My photographic memory serves me well.

“So who are you, then?” I ask him. “You came out of nowhere and spirited me away from an assailant. When you yourself were watching me the whole night. Don’t deny it, I saw you watching me in the club.” I feel compelled to let him know that I had actually spied him staring at me throughout the night. For some reason, his motivations remain just that. His.

“I was looking for someone.” There is a pregnant pause as he lets me digest his words before he starts again. “Someone that owes me a lot of money. He wasn’t at the club, but I saw you there. Thought you looked familiar.”

He is lying through his teeth. And I know this because a thin crimson line crawls languorously up the side of his neck, an obvious tell that he is being dishonest. Everyone has one; this is obviously his.Bad, bad liar.

I can’t help but smirk, indicating to him that I know he is lying but decide to drop the matter.

“Familiar enough that you followed me to the service station?”

“I think, if anything, you should just be glad that I was there to save your sorry ass."

11

DANTE

It’s early when I wake up, wiping a hand down my face wearily as I urge the sleep away. Moneybags isn’t in the bed. I look around the cabin; she’s nowhere to be seen and her bags are gone. I rise from the chair I fell asleep in and go to the window.

“Damn it!” I curse, clenching my teeth in irritation. The car is gone. And so is Moneybags.

My father is not a happy man when he finds out where I am. I hadn’t been able to infiltrate the Murray household whilst Maddog was alive, and now his son is holed up in the fortress with no reason to come out. They have doubled their security, and even Maddog’s number two Tate has taken to sleeping at the compound. No doubt because they are expecting a move on their organization. A business without a leader is as good as dead or dying.

I haven’t seen Moneybags enter or leave the house since the day at the gas station, which raises even more questions. I tell myself she had been a short term fixture with the Murrays and her work there was done. In all likelihood, I will never see her again. Especially after my car was delivered back to the cabin two days after it was taken. In all honesty, she continues to surprise me in unbelievable ways. No one knows where that cabin is, yet she had somehow managed to return the car to the location after she left it. The car had been delivered with a full tank of petrol, vacuumed and washed and completely wiped down so there was not a shred of evidence that she had ever been in the car. I know this because I try to have her prints lifted off the steering wheel. Then the seat. Then the door. The car is so clean, it could have been manufactured overnight and fallen out of the sky.

“We have one chance,” my father mutters. “One last chance… to get the boy.”

Like I said, my father is not a happy man.

“The funeral.”

“You’ve been watching the house for weeks; something’s got to give. He’ll have to come out for the funeral.”

“You don’t think they’ll toss a red herring?”

“Oh, they definitely will. Maddog was not one to not go out in style.”

* * *

Half a dozen menare watching the compound at any given time, looking for changes in the Murray household’s routine. They keep to a meticulous schedule, their lives running like clockwork as they regroup and plan the future of the Murray empire without a viable leader.

My men note down every entry and exit into the compound, including the food trucks that make their daily run. Tate leaves, but rarely, and only for a few hours at most, an angry scowl evident on his face as he exits the compound. No strangers are seen going in or out of the house. Moneybags is nowhere to be seen, and even the boy doesn’t make an appearance. Aside from the deliveries and the security guards dotting the perimeter, the compound is an otherwise deserted ghost-town.

I hit the comms in my ear, checking in with each of my men. We have cars scattered all around the compound, in either direction, on every street corner within a one mile radius. There is no way anyone can leave the compound and not drive past us.

It’s twelve days since Maddog’s death when the first sign of action happens. An escort of six massive black cars with tinted windows makes its way through the gates slowly, crawling along as though in mourning, and leave the compound, heading in the same direction.