I shoved the key and the micro-cassette into my trouser pocket, zipped the rabbit’s main compartment, and let the backpack drop back onto the floorboard just as the silhouette filled the doorway.

"Late night for an inspection, boss."

Dante stood under the perimeter floodlight, hands buried deep inside the pockets of his charcoal wool overcoat. His silver hair was combed back flat against his skull, damp with river mist. He smelled of clove cigarettes and peppermint—a habit he took up thirty years ago when my father told him his cigar smoke was giving the board members headaches.

"Left my reading glasses in the console," I said smoothly, stepping backward out of the Suburban and shutting the door with a dull thud. "Doctor said the swelling in my throat won't go down if I keep straining to read contracts on my phone."

Dante smiled. It was the same thin, measured twitch of the lips he had given me when I was nine years old and fell off the bay mare in the lower paddock.

"Sofia called the security desk five minutes ago," Dante said. He took two steps into the bay, his dress shoes clicking against the sealed concrete. "Claimed the little girl left her inhaler in the truck. Offered to send a car over to Crestview Drive to drop it off."

"Sofia called the security desk?" I asked, keeping my voice level.

"Front gate line," Dante replied without blinking. "Spoke to Mateo. Said she was frantic. I told Mateo I’d handle it personally. Didn't want the guards bothering you while you were resting."

He was lying.

Sofia hadn't called Mateo. Sofia had dialed the unlisted copper pair wired directly into my desk in the private library—a line that bypassed the front gate entirely, routed through the old switchboard terminal in the carriage house that Dante was supposed to have decommissioned four years ago.

"The girl doesn't have an inhaler," I said. "Just the EpiPen. And that was used on me."

Dante tilted his head. His eyes dropped to the floorboard through the tinted window of the Suburban, lingering on the white rabbit ears sticking out from under the seat.

"Right," Dante murmured softly. "The EpiPen. Miraculous thing, wasn't it? A four-year-old knowing just where to stick a four-inch needle into an adult thigh. Almost like someone rehearsed it with her."

He pulled his right hand from his pocket. He wasn't holding a weapon, just a heavy brass lighter. He turned it over and over in his palm, the clicking of the hinge sharp as a gunshot in the cavernous garage.

"Nico didn't leave on that freighter from Baltimore, Alejandro," Dante said. "His passport was flagged at Newark forty minutes ago."