Chương 2
Nora sat across from him on a narrow upholstered bench. Marcus’s cracked phone lay inside a clear evidence bag beside her. She had picked it up from beneath the cabinet before one of Dominic’s men could pocket it. The stuffed rabbit rested on her lap, the recorder light no longer blinking.
The tray had left a cut across her palm. She watched a bead of blood gather and wiped it against a tissue.
Dominic noticed.
“You need stitches?”
“No.”
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“It doesn’t need stitches.”
He looked at the medical-wing door. “He locked it from the inside.”
“Yes.”
“My people were supposed to be watching every entrance.”
“Marcus was your people.”
Dominic absorbed that without defending himself. The restraint looked unnatural on him, as if anger were a physical weight he had chosen to hold in place.
A guard approached from the stairwell. “He’s secured.”
“Alone?”
“Two men outside. One inside.”
“Names.”
The guard gave them.
Dominic’s eyes narrowed. “Replace Bellini.”
“He’s been with us nine years.”
“So was Marcus.”
The guard left quickly.
Nora turned the silver bracelet over in her fingers. The engraved date belonged to an October night in New Haven when she and Eva had sat on the hood of Nora’s dead Honda Civic eating vending-machine crackers because neither had enough cash for a tow truck. Eva had been twenty-one, wearing a green coat with one broken button. She had promised Nora that one day, when they were rich, they would never again eat anything wrapped in plastic.
Neither of them had been rich then.
Eva had married wealth and learned it could be another kind of hunger.
“What happened on October seventeenth?” Dominic asked.
Nora looked up.
“You recognize the date.”
“It was before you knew her.”
“Everything important in Eva’s life began before I knew her. She made sure I understood that whenever we argued.”
Despite himself, there was almost affection in his voice. It vanished when he looked at the rabbit.
“When did you put the recorder inside?”
“This morning.”
“Why?”
“Lily said someone came into her room last night.”
“There were nurses.”
“She said the person stood in the dark and hummed.”
Dominic’s eyes sharpened. “The song.”
“I didn’t know what she meant. She wouldn’t name anyone. She kept asking whether stuffed animals could remember things.”
“So you cut open her rabbit.”
“I opened the seam. I didn’t cut it.”
“That distinction matters to you?”
“It matters to Lily.”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You suspected Marcus.”
“I suspected everyone who could enter this wing without being questioned.”
“That includes me.”
“Yes.”
His mouth tightened.
Nora had known men who became louder when challenged. Dominic became quieter. It was one of the things that had frightened her most when Eva first described him, and one of the things she had eventually understood. Noise was what powerless men used when they wanted the room to mistake them for powerful ones. Dominic had never needed the mistake.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“Because you would have tightened security.”
“I should have tightened security.”
“You would have put Marcus in charge of it.”
For a moment, the hallway held only the murmur of the oxygen line behind the door.
Dominic sat back.
A nurse emerged carrying the bent bracelet chain in a specimen cup. Nora held out her hand, but the nurse looked to Dominic.
“Give it to her,” he said.
The nurse obeyed.
That small deference irritated Nora more than it should have. Eva used to complain about it. At restaurants, servers handed Dominic the check even when Eva requested it. At doctors’ offices, people explained her body to him. In their own home, staff watched his face to find out whether her words were instructions.
“Dr. Mehta says Lily is stable,” the nurse said. “She needs quiet.”
“Can I see her?” Dominic asked.
“In a few minutes.”
“Can Nora?”
The nurse glanced between them. “One person.”
“Her,” Dominic said.
Nora did not thank him.
When the nurse left, he said, “Marcus claimed Eva promised you something.”
“Marcus was trying to save himself.”
“That doesn’t mean he lied.”
“No. It means he chose the truth he thought would hurt most.”
“What did she promise you?”
Nora felt the old message sitting inside her phone as if the device were in her pocket, though it was charging in the guest room. Three minutes and forty-seven seconds of Eva’s voice. Nora had listened to the first twelve seconds twice and then stopped.
She had not told Dominic it existed.
“Nothing,” she said.
His gaze stayed on her face.
She added, “Nothing I accepted.”
“That is a different answer.”
Before she could respond, a sharp sound rose from below them. It was not a gunshot. Something heavier struck a wall, followed by running feet.
Dominic stood.
His phone rang.
He answered without taking his eyes off the stairwell.
The guard on the other end spoke long enough for Dominic’s face to empty.
“When?”
Another pause.
“Seal the property.”
Nora rose. “What happened?”
Dominic lowered the phone. “Marcus is gone.”
The escape had required less than two minutes.
Bellini, the guard Dominic had ordered replaced, entered the basement security room before his replacement arrived. The man stationed inside with Marcus knew Bellini and opened the door. Bellini shot him in the leg, cut Marcus’s plastic restraints, and used Marcus’s security code to unlock the service tunnel leading from the mansion’s wine cellar to an old carriage house near the eastern wall.
The code should have been disabled the moment Marcus was detained.
Marcus had designed the system.
By the time Dominic’s men reached the carriage house, a black utility vehicle was crashing through the estate’s outer gate. The driver clipped a stone post, shattered the passenger window, and left fragments of dark glass scattered across the road.
Dominic wanted pursuit vehicles sent in every direction.
Nora wanted an ambulance.
“The guard downstairs is bleeding,” she said.
May you like
“He has a medic.”
“He has a man with a bag. That isn’t the same thing.”
