Chương 7
“It doesn’t work.”
“It will when I tell you. Keep it turned off.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Our address. Tell them there’s a sick woman and a man with a gun.”
“Do I say your name?”
Dante looked toward Elena.
His name would change the response. Police dispatchers would see the address, the history, and the reports tied to it. Tactical units would come. News crews might follow. Warrants could come later. Every locked room in the mansion would become a question.
Marcus had built his plan around Dante’s refusal to invite law enforcement onto the property.
“Yes,” Dante said. “Say my name.”
Zoe waited for him to change his mind.
He did not.
A faint metallic strike sounded inside the passage. Marcus testing the grate.
Dante climbed the pantry stairs.
At the top, he opened the door half an inch. The kitchen lights were still on, though dimmed to their nighttime setting. Copper pans hung above the central island. A pot of soup Elena had made earlier sat covered on the stove, untouched. One cabinet door remained open.
The ordinary disorder bothered Dante more than the bullet hole upstairs.
Elena always closed cabinets.
He studied the reflection in the glass oven door.
No movement.
He opened the pantry and stepped into the kitchen.
Zoe stayed below with her mother.
Dante moved along the island, keeping low. A security tablet rested beside the fruit bowl. Its screen showed the mansion’s floor plan, all camera feeds dark except one.
The shoe-shine room.
The green banker’s lamp glowed again.
Marcus had turned it on.
On the screen, the polished Oxford Dante had moved now sat upright near the window. The shoe reflected a tiny section of the room. A black shape crossed behind the camera.
The feed froze.
Dante touched nothing.
Beside the tablet lay a black glove.
Marcus had left it deliberately.
Dante lifted it by the cuff. Inside, the lining was damp with sweat and marked by a dark smear.
Blood.
His bullet in the linen room had hit Marcus after all, likely the outer edge of his hand. The injury explained why Marcus had withdrawn and why his movements in the cellar sounded slower.
A small injury, but real.
Marcus wanted Dante to see the glove because he wanted the injury mistaken for weakness.
Dante smelled gasoline.
Not from the kitchen.
From the hallway leading toward the private office.
Marcus was not planning only to steal the archive. He intended to burn what he could not take and make the mansion look like the site of an internal war. Dante’s body, the household staff, and the records would disappear together.
Zoe’s voice came softly from the pantry. “Mr. Romano?”
He crossed back.
“Quiet.”
“Mama moved.”
Elena’s eyes had opened slightly. They did not focus. Her lips formed a sound without language, then closed again. Zoe held her hand.
Dante crouched.
Elena’s gaze found him for half a second. Fear entered it, then recognition, then something harder. Her fingers tightened weakly around Zoe’s.
She had trusted him enough to bring her daughter into his house.
That fact did not make him good. It made him responsible.
A floorboard creaked in the kitchen.
Dante turned.
Marcus stood near the hall entrance.
His dark overcoat was open over the black security suit. Blood darkened his left glove. The suppressed rifle rested against his shoulder, aimed at Dante’s chest. His face was pale, controlled, and more tired than predatory now that no window separated them.
Zoe remained below the stair line. Marcus could not see her.
Dante’s pistol was in his right hand, but the muzzle pointed toward the floor.
Neither man fired.
The kitchen island stood between them, crowded with a bowl of pears, a folded newspaper, and a ceramic container full of wooden spoons. The chandelier above the breakfast table gave a faint electrical buzz.
“You broke the watch,” Marcus said.
“You scratched the screws.”
“I expected you to notice months ago.”
“I trusted you.”
Marcus’s mouth tightened. “Don’t make that sound generous.”
Dante shifted half a step, blocking the pantry opening.
Marcus adjusted the rifle by the same amount.
“Where’s Elena?” he asked.
“Safe.”
“That word has never meant what you think it means.”
“You poisoned her?”
“No.”
“The tea.”
“Chamomile.”
“You expect me to believe you?”
“I don’t care what you believe. I need the archive.”
Dante watched the rifle, not Marcus’s eyes. The suppressor made the barrel long and harder to maneuver around the island. Marcus’s injured hand would slow any sudden correction.
“You could have taken it while I was gone,” Dante said.
“Not without your palm and the mechanical key.”
“You have copies of everything else.”
“Not those.”
“You could have cut off my hand.”
“I considered it.”
Zoe’s breathing changed below the stairs.
Dante spoke before she could react. “You considered a lot of things.”
Marcus’s eyes flicked once toward the pantry.
Dante raised his pistol.
Marcus raised the rifle.
The movement ended with both weapons aligned.
For a long second, the only sound was the soup pot lid ticking as metal cooled.
Marcus said, “If the girl comes up, I lower the rifle.”
“No.”
“I haven’t hurt her.”
“You shot into the room.”
“I shot where you had been. You moved faster than expected.”
“That your defense?”
“I’m not defending myself.”
Marcus’s voice remained level, but the skin beneath his eyes had tightened. The blood on his glove had reached the cuff.
Dante knew his habits too. Marcus became precise when angry. He cleaned his language, reduced his movement, and spoke as though every sentence had been approved by a lawyer.
The rage was there.
It had been there longer than tonight.
“This isn’t about the archive,” Dante said.
Marcus gave no reaction.
“The archive is the exit. Not the reason.”
“You always need a deeper reason. It makes you feel less ordinary.”
“Adrian.”
The rifle shifted less than an inch.
May you like
Dante had not said the name in years.
Adrian Vale had been Marcus’s younger brother, loud, careless, and eager to prove that being born after Marcus did not make him less capable. He had worked protection on a West Side warehouse used for cash storage. During a police raid eight years earlier, Dante had ordered the inner doors locked to stop employees from abandoning the money.
