Chapter 111: Lindsay Breaks

Chapter 111: Lindsay Breaks
They'd been at it for six hours.
The room they were using was in the lower level of one of Damon's properties — a room that didn't appear in any building plan and that the cleaning staff had standing instructions to skip.
Lindsay was in a chair in the middle of it. Her wrists were bound behind her. One of her eyes had swollen mostly shut in the second hour, and her lip had been split twice, and she had not said anything useful in any of those six hours.
Damon's men were not amateurs. She was scared. She wasn't going to pretend otherwise. But she knew the moment she gave them something real, the math on her survival changed significantly for the worse.
So she said nothing, and she endured it, and she waited.
Damon himself hadn't been in the room for most of it. He had people for this. He came down in the third hour, looked at her, looked at his men, and left again without a word.
They weren't done trying, which meant she was still useful, which meant she was still breathing.
In the fifth hour, they stopped hitting her.
That was when she got nervous.
One of the men left the room and came back with a phone. He played her an audio recording — a call, her own voice, from a number she recognized as one she'd used to reach Sergei. She listened to herself on the recording and kept her face neutral.
"We now know you're Cardini," the man said.
She didn't confirm or deny. She looked at the wall behind his head.
"We now know you were planted," he said. "We know the whole thing with the club was a setup. What we want to know is who sent you in."
She said nothing.
He nodded to the other man in the room, who went out and came back with a laptop. He opened it and turned it around so she could see the screen. It was a photograph. A facility.
She knew the facility. She had never been there, but she knew what it was because Max had told her once, in a rare moment of something close to openness, that there were exactly two locations he considered truly off-limits to the operation. Two places nobody touched.
She said nothing.
"We found this through a contact," the man said. "We're not entirely sure yet what it is. We thought you might help us understand it."
She kept looking at it and did not say anything, and the man nodded again, and what happened in the next several minutes was something she chose not to think about in terms that would make it worse than it already was.
She held for as long as she could.
She held longer than she thought she would.
And then, through the pain and through the fear and through the specific, awful weight of that photograph still sitting on the laptop screen, something came loose.
"Max," she said.
The room went quiet.
"Maximilian Cardini." Her voice was not steady but it was clear. "He runs the Cardini. All of it. Every piece of what you've been losing money to for the past three years — the port delays, the banking contacts that keep pulling out, the regulatory filings that go nowhere — that's him. That's all him."
The man with the laptop looked at the door. The other man left the room immediately.
Damon came down four minutes later.
He stopped in the doorway and looked at Lindsay, and then he looked at his man, who gave him a very short summary of what she'd said.
He walked to the center of the room. He stood in front of Lindsay and looked at her for a long time.
"Max," he said. “Hes is Maximilian Cardini.”
"Six hours. Took you six whole hours." Lindsay said. Her voice was wrecked, but she smiled at him anyway. It cost her something to do it. She did it anyway. "Your wife’s fucking bodyguard. And you never once — "
"Enough," he said.
"You know what's funny?" She kept going because she had nothing left to lose by it, and she was angry and scared, and this was the only weapon she had left. "Everyone thought Sergei was the one running the Cardini. That's what you all thought. That's what your contacts thought. Your intelligence people, your rivals, all of them chasing Sergei, building files on Sergei." She shook her head slowly, which hurt. "Sergei runs errands."
Damon looked at her.
"Max has been running it," she said.
Lindsay had seen him angry before — she'd spent months watching him, that was the job — and this was not anger in any form she recognized. This was something that had moved past anger that was considerably more dangerous.
He turned away from her and walked toward the door.
"Damon," she said.
He stopped.
"Your wife is with him," she said. "I want you to understand that. She's with Max. And the second you made that call, Max knew I was compromised. He's known for hours." She paused. "So whatever you think you're going to do next — whatever trade you're building in your head — you should know that the only reason Max hasn't moved on you yet is that he's deciding how he wants to do it."
Damon didn't turn around.
"And now that he knows," she said. "You're not getting your wife back."
He stood at the door for another moment.
Then he said, quietly, to the man behind her, "Clean this up. I need the room."
He left.
Lindsay sat in the chair and breathed carefully through her nose, because breathing through her mouth hurt too much, and she listened to his footsteps go up the stairs, and she thought about the photograph on the laptop screen, and she thought about what she had not said, Max’s location, and that's the only thing she would take to the grave.
She stared at the floor and waited to see what came next.