At Two in the Morning, the Nursery Door Locked Them Inside

“Where?” Lorenzo asked.

Marco shook his head. The movement tightened his face with pain.

“Carlo,” he whispered.

Lorenzo became motionless.

Marco gripped his sleeve. “Not what… he said.”

Footsteps sounded below.

Several men shouted from the lower hall. Lorenzo raised the pistol toward the staircase.

Elena stepped back into the nursery.

“Are they yours?”

“I don’t know.”

“That is not a reassuring answer.”

The first man to reach the top landing wore the dark suit of mansion security. Two more followed. All three stopped when they saw Lorenzo’s gun and Marco on the floor.

“Boss,” one of them said, lifting empty hands. “We lost the cameras. Mr. Carlo told us there was a breach at the east gate.”

“Where is he?”

“Downstairs.”

Lorenzo’s jaw tightened. “Did you see Daria?”

“No.”

“Call an ambulance.”

The guard hesitated.

Elena understood the hesitation. An ambulance meant records, police questions, strangers entering the Rossi mansion. It meant the kind of attention everyone employed there had been trained to prevent.

Lorenzo saw it too.

“Now.”

The guard reached for his phone.

“No signal,” another man said.

“Use the landline.”

“The main line’s dead.”

Elena looked at Lorenzo. “My phone is in the staff room.”

“No one leaves this floor alone.”

“Leo needs a hospital.”

“He has doctors.”

“He needs a hospital.”

“I said he has doctors.”

“And whoever has been starving him knows who they are.”

The men near the staircase went quiet.

Lorenzo stood over Marco, his face unreadable.

Elena had heard stories about him before taking the job. Everyone in that part of Westchester had. Some stories involved unions, gambling rooms, construction contracts, and men who vanished from social clubs. Others sounded absurd enough to have been invented by people who enjoyed fear from a safe distance.

None of the stories had mentioned that Lorenzo Rossi could look indecisive.

He took a breath through his nose.

“Give me your phone,” he told the nearest guard.

“No service, boss.”

“Emergency calls may still go through.”

The screen showed no connection.

Elena glanced toward the tall windows at the end of the corridor. Beyond them, the lawn dropped toward the old gatehouse. The property’s internal signal equipment sat in a locked room beneath the west staircase. Daria had complained about it during a staff meeting after a storm.

“There’s another landline in the kitchen,” Elena said. “The copper one. Mrs. Voss said it doesn’t run through the security system.”

Lorenzo looked toward the stairs.

“I’ll go,” one of the guards said.

“No.” Lorenzo handed him the pistol. “Stay with Marco.”

He crossed to Elena.

For a moment she thought he meant to take Leo. She tightened her hold.

Instead Lorenzo pulled the front of her uniform gently across the baby and fastened one button above the blanket. His knuckles did not touch her skin.

“Can you walk?”

“Yes.”

“Stay behind me.”

They descended together.

The mansion seemed to have emptied itself. Lights that should have burned through the night were dark. The only illumination came from blue moonlight and the emergency strips along the baseboards. Expensive paintings watched from paneled walls. Somewhere downstairs, a clock continued to mark the quarter hour as though nothing had changed.

Elena heard her own bare shoes against the staircase. She had lost one slipper in the nursery and kicked off the other before leaving. The polished wood was cold beneath her feet.

Leo made a small sound.

Lorenzo stopped.

“He’s breathing,” Elena said.

“I can see that.”

“No, you can’t.”

His face turned toward her.

“Keep moving,” she said.

The kitchen occupied the rear of the house, beyond a formal dining room no one used after midnight. Copper pans hung above a marble island. A pot of coffee had been left on the warmer until it burned down to black residue. The smell mingled with lemon cleanser and the faint oil odor clinging to their clothes.

Elena found the old wall phone behind a pantry door.

There was a dial tone.

She called emergency services before Lorenzo could change his mind.

The dispatcher asked for the address, number of patients, nature of the emergency. Elena answered while Lorenzo stood close enough to hear every word.

“Two-month-old infant, severely weak, possible prolonged underfeeding,” she said. “One adult woman unconscious, possible drugging. One adult man with a serious wound.”

The dispatcher asked whether there were weapons in the house.

Elena looked at Lorenzo.

He looked back.

“Yes,” she said. “There are armed people here.”

His mouth tightened.

The dispatcher instructed everyone to put down their weapons and meet the ambulance outside.

“That won’t happen,” Lorenzo said.

Elena covered the receiver. “Then they may not come in.”

“They’ll come.”

“They’ll wait for police.”

A muscle shifted in his cheek.

From the corridor behind them came the sound of a door closing.

Lorenzo turned.

“Who’s there?”

No answer.

He took a carving knife from a wooden block.

Elena nearly laughed. It rose in her throat as a dry, inappropriate breath. Lorenzo Rossi, feared throughout the county, standing in his own kitchen with a carving knife because he had handed away his gun.

The absurdity vanished when a figure moved past the doorway.

Lorenzo crossed the room and pulled the door open.

Carlo Rossi stood in the corridor wearing a camel-colored coat over his pajamas. At fifty-nine, he had retained the compact build of a man who treated aging as an insult. Silver touched his temples. His expression held concern so perfectly arranged that Elena distrusted it before he spoke.

“Thank God,” Carlo said. “I heard shots.”

Lorenzo did not lower the knife.

“Where is Daria?”

Carlo looked from him to Elena and the bundled child in her arms.

“What is she doing with Leo?”

“Answer me.”

“I was asleep. The alarms woke me. Security said there were men at the east gate.”

“There were no men.”

Carlo’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”

“Marco is bleeding upstairs.”

The concern on Carlo’s face changed shape but did not deepen.