Chapter 11
Viktor looked between us.
“Your brother is Daniel Martin?”
“Yes.”
The room went silent.
So Luca’s car had picked up Mateo.
Voluntarily.
Which meant either Luca and Mateo were working together—
or something far more complicated was happening.
“Go,” Sophia said.
I looked at her.
“Find out what Northstar is.”
I walked to the crib.
Elena was awake now.
Her eyes were open.
Dark.
Unfocused.
I touched one finger gently to her hand.
She wrapped her tiny fingers around it.
I stopped breathing.
Sophia watched us.
“I’ll come back,” I said.
Sophia’s expression changed.
It was subtle.
But I understood why.
Promises had become expensive.
“Come back after you know something,” she said.
I nodded.
“That I can promise.”
The warehouse stood near the river in an older industrial district where Chicago seemed to forget itself.
By the time Viktor and I arrived, rain had begun tapping against the windshield.
The building was narrow and brick, wedged between a machine shop and an abandoned printing company.
No lights.
No cars.
The storage key opened the side door.
Inside smelled like dust and wet concrete.
Rows of metal shelves stretched through the darkness.
Viktor found the electrical panel.
Half the lights came on.
Boxes.
Thousands of them.
All labeled with Harbor Relief dates.
“Two years of records?” Viktor asked.
“Looks like more.”
We searched the aisles.
Near the back was a locked office.
The key opened that too.
Inside stood a desk.
A filing cabinet.
A disconnected computer.
And one blue plastic storage box.
On the lid someone had written:
NORTHSTAR.
I stared at it.
Viktor looked at me.
“You want me to open it?”
“No.”
I lifted the lid myself.
Inside were folders.
Photographs.
Copies of bank statements.
But the first thing I saw was my father.
A photograph taken twenty years earlier.
He stood beside Mateo.
And another man.
My uncle Carlo.
All three were younger.
Smiling.
Behind them was a construction sign.
NORTHSTAR DEVELOPMENT PROJECT.
“What the hell?” Viktor whispered.
I opened the first folder.
Northstar wasn’t a person.
It had been a company.
A real-estate partnership created by my father, Carlo, and Mateo fifteen years earlier.
According to the documents, it bought condemned industrial properties, renovated them, then sold them through shell corporations.
Some became warehouses I still owned.
Some became Harbor Relief properties years later.
I turned pages faster.
“What are you seeing?” Viktor asked.
“I don’t know yet.”