Chapter 3 - Shadows in the East Wing
The silence in the kitchen shattered.
“Grace,” I commanded, my voice dropping into absolute, lethal authority. “Take the girls down through the service cellar to the panic room behind the wine cellar. Lock the iron door. Do not open it for anyone—not even if you hear my voice—unless I give the specific password.”
“What password?” Grace asked, her eyes wide.
“Stella,” I said, naming the family dog Isabelle and I had rescued the year we got married—a dog that had died five years ago. “Go. Now.”
Grace didn't argue. She grabbed Olivia, Sophie, and Nora, ushering them toward the heavy oak door leading to the back stairs with practiced, urgent efficiency. As Olivia disappeared into the stairwell, she turned back and looked at me once more. In her eyes wasn't the total silence of the past fourteen months, but a flicker of something terrifyingly fragile: hope.
Don't die, Daddy. She didn't say the words, but I heard them loud and clear in the empty space she left behind.
I drew the SIG Sauer from beneath my coat, the heavy metal settling comfortably into my palm. I flicked off the safety with a soft click.
I walked out of the kitchen and into the grand hallway, keeping close to the walnut-paneled walls. The estate was massive—a sprawling, thirty-room limestone mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, surrounded by ten acres of iron-fenced security perimeter. Cameras covered every inch of the grounds. Motion sensors swept the lawn.
Yet, someone had bypassed the digital logs.
I glided across the polished marble floor toward the east wing, where the private study and the private elevator were located. The air grew colder as I approached the heavy double doors of the study. A faint, sickeningly familiar scent hung in the air—peppermint and old paper.
The door to the study was cracked open by an inch. A warm bar of yellow light spilled out onto the Persian rug.
I raised my weapon, positioned my right foot against the edge of the heavy mahogany door, and kicked it inward with explosive force.
“Don't move!” I roared, stepping through the threshold, sweeping the barrel of the gun in a wide arc across the room.
The study was empty.
A leather desk chair was still spinning slowly, as if someone had just leaped out of it. On the mahogany desk sat an open laptop, its screen glowing with live camera feeds from the exterior perimeter gates. Next to the laptop sat a half-empty glass of amber scotch and a silver signet ring engraved with a coiled serpent—the crest of the Lucchese crime family’s northern branch.
Vincent Moretti’s ring.
My breath caught. Vincent. My shadow. The man who had managed my accounts, coordinated my security, and held my hand at Isabelle’s funeral while whispering condolences about how we would “find the bastards who did this.”
A floorboard creaked above my head.
The private staircase leading to the third-floor rooftop terrace.
I didn't hesitate. I lowered my center of gravity, sprinted across the study, and slammed my shoulder against the private stairwell door, bursting up the spiral steps two at a time.
When I hit the top landing, the heavy oak door leading to the open-air terrace was swinging wide open.
The cold October wind whipped through my hair, carrying the distant smell of the Atlantic and the roar of a helicopter idling on the private helipad behind the tree line.
Standing near the edge of the helipad, illuminated by the flashing red navigation lights of a sleek Eurocopter, was a tall figure in a tailored charcoal overcoat. He turned around slowly, holding a black leather briefcase in one hand, a silver cigarette case in the other.
It was Vincent.
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He didn't look panicked. He looked tired, bored, and slightly disappointed, like a man whose dinner reservation had been delayed by ten minutes.
“Dominic,” Vincent called out over the screaming whine of the helicopter’s twin turbine engines. He took a slow drag from his cigarette, the tip glowing a bright, angry orange in the dark. “You really should teach your housekeepers to stay in the kitchen. They see entirely too much.”
