Page 214 of Their Arrangement
Erez Melek.
He’d once been a broker. Too ambitious. Too efficient. He cut deals too fast, burned favors too wide.
Barron buried him five years ago.
Or tried.
“You’re telling me the man who lost everything under our heel is slipping stones past EU customs under a ghost proxy?”
“Not just stones,” London said. “Routes. Contacts. Safehouses. Your shadow systems in South Africa are now compromised. Quietly. Almost surgically. That’s not Selene. She wants noise. Erez wants legacy.”
And Cloe?
She’d walked into the crosshairs of a war that was bigger than family.
“She was just the warning shot,” I said.
London didn’t reply. He didn’t need to. Because we both knew what came next. I looked at the altar. At the flickering candlelight pooled beneath what used to be stained glass saints.
“Then let’s start in Belgium.”
The hotel was glass and silence.
Nothing branded.
Nothing trackable.
The kind of place where favors replaced credit cards, andthe concierge asked no questions unless he was paid to deliver them later.
London had cleared the floor. Gutted the suite. No art on the walls. No flowers in the vases. There were no beds. Just a long black table that looked like it had been carried in through the freight elevator by ghosts.
Two chairs.
One window.
No blinds.
A single pendant light hung low over the table, casting a perfect circle of illumination that left everything else in the suite shadowed and still.
The man they brought in didn’t wear a mask. He didn’t need one. He sat in the chair like he’d been there before. Not just in this room—but in this kind of reckoning.
Like he knew the rules.
Like he’d helped write them.
London stood at the edge of the room for exactly three seconds. Then nodded once to me. Didn’t speak. Didn’t offer last words. That was the favor. He closed the door behind him with the finality of a coffin lid.
And I was alone.
With the man who moved the money that put Cloe on the floor.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t shift. Didn’t even blink. But he smiled. That slow, smug kind of smile that made my knuckles itch and my heart stop pretending it could stay calm.
I set my coat down.
Rolled up my sleeves.
Didn’t rush.
