Chapter 2 - The Bullet and the Fracture
The quartz clock on the kitchen wall ticked. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.
Every fiber of my training, every brutal instinct that had kept my lungs breathing while iron-shod boots tried to stomp them into the gutters of Manhattan, screamed at me to draw the Sig Sauer tucked into my shoulder holster. To clear the room. To eliminate the variables.
Because in my world, an unexpected variable was a sniper's crosshair or a poisoned chalice.
Instead, I stood paralyzed on the imported Italian tile. The flour smeared across the young maid’s cheek looked like a chalk-mark on a tombstone. Mia’s breath hitched in her throat, the bubble of joy popping before it could fully form. Valentina instinctively stepped backward, her tiny red shoes scraping against the grout, seeking refuge behind the tall, angular frame of Rosa Bennett, our longtime housekeeper.
And Lucia—my oldest, my miniature Isabella with those same piercing hazel eyes that could see right through my iron-plated armor—was still clutching the lapel of my bespoke charcoal overcoat. Her fingers were curled so tight her knuckles were stark white.
“Lucia,” I rasped, my throat feeling as though it had been scrubbed with coarse grit. My chest heaved. “What did you say?”
Lucia didn't blink. The silence that followed wasn't the peaceful quiet of a sleeping house; it was the suffocating, atmospheric pressure before a cyclone strikes.
“You heard her, Dominic.”
Rosa’s voice cut through the air like a cold chisel. She stepped forward, her weathered face set in lines of grim, unforgiving steel. She didn't look like an employee addressing the billionaire crime lord who signed her generous pension checks. She looked like a mother protecting her cubs from a predator.
“Rosa,” I warned, my voice dropping into that dark, flat register that made capos in Queens beg for mercy. “Shut your mouth. Let the child speak.”
“She did speak,” Rosa snapped, her eyes flashing behind her wire-rimmed glasses. “And she said what she’s been turning over in her terrified little brain for fourteen months while you were out blowing up warehouses and slaughtering Mendoza soldiers in the name of ‘justice.’ You want to terrorize someone? Terrorize me. Don't look at her like that.”
I ignored Rosa. I dropped to one knee, bringing my eyes level with Lucia’s trembling frame. The smell of raw cookie dough and vanilla hung heavily in the warm kitchen air, clashing violently with the faint, metallic tang of gun oil and stale cigar smoke that clung to my suit.
“Lu,” I whispered, reaching out with a hand that had never trembled during a firefight, but was shaking now as I hovered inches from her shoulder. “Look at me. Who told you that?”
Lucia’s lower lip quivered. A single tear broke over her long eyelashes, tracing a clean path through the flour dusting her cheek.
“The… the man in the dark coat,” she whispered, her voice reedy and thin from fourteen months of absolute disuse, like a rusty hinge forced open for the first time in a decade. “He… he came to the nursery window. The night the bad men broke the car. He said… he said Daddy’s enemies couldn't reach us while Mommy was driving, so Daddy gave them the schedule so they would stop fighting him.”
The blood drained from my face so fast my vision tunneled into a pinprick of blackness.
A man in a dark coat.
The night of the ambush in Queens.
“So Daddy gave them the schedule.”
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The world tilted on its axis. Fourteen months of pure, unadulterated vengeance—fourteen months of hunting down every low-level thug, every crooked cop, every Mendoza foot soldier who had anything to do with that rainy intersection on Grand Avenue—suddenly tasted like ash in my mouth.
I hadn't just been fighting an external war. I had been fighting a phantom while the real architect of my wife's murder sat in my own dining room, drank my scotch, and patted my daughters on the head.
