Page 10 of Danger Close
Ezra didn’t know the mother.Didn’t know where the girl had been taken or what name she lived under now.Just that she was five years old.Missing.Maybe moved to another country.Maybe sold off.
And Van had been on the trail—alone.
Ezra hadn’t even known.
The rage that had followed had been slow-burning and cold.Not at Van.Never at Van.But at himself—for being too far away, for not reading the signs sooner, for every second he’d wasted chasing ghosts when there had been flesh and blood still out there.His flesh and blood.Still waiting.
His blood pressure spiked just thinking about it.
“Porositët?”the waiter asked gently, hand ghosting near the table’s edge.
Ezra blinked, pulled back from the spiral, and nodded.“Po, faleminderit.”Already ordered.Thanks.
A man at the next table, sharp suit, café-casual confidence, turned with a practiced smile.“Shqipja jote është e mire ...por nuk je vendas,”he said easily.Your Albanian is good, but you’re not local.
Ezra gave a one-shouldered shrug.“Jam vetëm në kalim.”Just passing through.
The man’s smile turned flirtatious, and he said, shifting effortlessly to English, the accent faint.“Men who are just passing through are often the most interesting.”
Ezra smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.“Whilst that is most definitely true, this one is very much taken.”
The man tilted his head, intrigued.“He lucky?”
Ezra paused.
Something bitter curled in the back of his throat.His hand tightened around the ceramic cup, the warmth of it grounding him.“I don’t think he knows and after the last time we were in the same place at the same time, I don’t think he would care.”
“Then, tell him.”The stranger said with a simple shrug.
Ezra looked away, eyes drifting out into the mist-shrouded street beyond the café.
Wish I had.
Ricky’s face rose unbidden—sharp lines, quiet mouth, those dark, wounded eyes that had tracked Ezra like he saw him in a way no one else ever had.That night—unexpected, cautious, and terrifyingly real—had cracked something open in Ezra’s chest.He’d panicked.Bolted.Told himself it was nothing.That he had to leave in order to get to the bottom of what Van had been searching for.
But he’d felt it.The shift.He hadn’t just left Ricky that morning.He’d abandoned something—something that might’ve been the first real connection he’d had since Van.And he regretted it every damn day since.
The man studied him for a moment longer, then reached into his coat and dropped a few bills on his table—enough to cover a drink he hadn’t ordered and a tip generous enough to make an impression.
“No one ever really just passes through, Mr.Navarro,” he said softly in Albanian.
Ezra’s gaze flicked upward sharply.
He hadn’t given his name.
But the man was already walking away, polished shoes silent on the rain-slick cobblestone, his dark silhouette folding into the mist like he’d never been there at all.
And Ezra, heart suddenly thudding, knew with grim certainty—
He’d just been made.
Ezra didn’t move right away.
The man’s departure left a void at the café, the kind that made instincts prickle.The way he’d known Ezra’s name and just slid it into the conversation matter-of-fact like.The way he hadn’t pushed, hadn’t waited for a response, just—stood and walked away.
No one ever really just passes through.
Ezra’s pulse kicked up.He pushed away from the table, eyes scanning the street.Nothing overt.A few pedestrians under umbrellas.A kid kicking a flattened soda can.Two men standing near the corner stall, talking low and fast—but not watching him.
