Page 9 of Danger Close
Door closed.Lights off.
No one stopped him.
Then he was gone.
Chapter Two
The rain had a sharp, metallic taste in Tirana.It fell in misty sheets over the cracked sidewalk, softening the hard outlines of crumbling façades and mixing with the bitter bite of espresso on Ezra Navarro’s tongue.He sat alone beneath the sagging canvas awning outside a narrow café wedged between a pharmacy and a shuttered bookstore.Hoodie up.Face in shadow.Boots dusted with roadside grime.
He stirred the coffee absently, eyes fixed on the folded paper beside his cup.The ink in the corner had already blurred from a stray raindrop.One line stared back at him like a taunt he had only partially deciphered.
The key is where it should be.The answer is yes.Now go find yours.
Van had always known how Ezra thought.The encrypted message had come wrapped in so many layers of misdirection it had taken Ezra a couple of months to untangle.A cache in Bucharest.A safe deposit box in Shkodër.And finally a corrupted flash drive hidden inside an NGO database that only existed on a dusty terminal in a forgotten clinic in northern Albania.
And all of that to get to—this.
A list.
Six hundred and twenty-seven girls.Names.Photos.Ages.
All trafficked through an orphanage network tied to cartel-backed “rescue” operations.The kind of NGOs that looked squeaky clean on the surface—polished websites, staged photos, smiling foreign volunteers—but beneath it all, the funding trails led to narco accounts, arms shipments, and relocation programs that didn’t rescue anyone.
They disappeared them.
Buried deep in the manifest files—beneath pages of falsified intake forms, falsified birth records, and case worker logs likely written by someone with blood on their hands—was a string of genetic metadata.Encrypted, mislabeled, but traceable if you knew what to look for.
Ezra had known.And the DNA string flagged in red across his screen?
Donovan Knowles.
Ezra had stared at that match result for a full five minutes before he remembered how to breathe.The noise in his head had gone dead quiet.Not in shock.Not even fear.Just ...gravity.Like the weight of a hundred moments collapsing at once.Van had a daughter.
A daughter.
And he’d died before he had been able to find her.
