Chapter 3 - THE HOUSE THAT LOCKED DOWN
Marco shoved Emma and Isabella behind the thick stone wall beside my office. My men drew their weapons and spread through the corridor, moving with the practiced efficiency of people who had spent years preparing for the worst.
I kept one hand on Emma’s shoulder. “Stay here. Don’t move until Marco tells you.”
She nodded, suddenly silent.
The emergency lights came on a moment later, bathing the hall in red. A guard called from the staircase that the shot had come from the service entrance. Another reported that the front gate camera had gone offline for thirty seconds.
“Lock down the property,” I ordered. “No one leaves. No one enters. Find the man in the gray coat.”
Marco took two men downstairs. I stayed with Isabella and Emma, though every instinct told me to go hunting.
Isabella was shaking. Emma wrapped both arms around her mother’s waist and pressed her face against her dress.
I had seen men lie with a gun to their heads. I had seen captains betray their closest friends for money. Isabella’s fear was different. It was the fear of someone who knew the danger had finally caught up with her.
“Tell me about Anthony,” I said.
She looked at Emma first. “Not in front of her.”
“Then start with why a stranger knows your daughter’s name.”
“I don’t know how he knows.”
“Isabella.”
She flinched at the warning in my voice.
I lowered it. “Someone came into my house, approached your four-year-old, and used her to deliver a message about my dead brother. I need the truth.”
Before she could answer, Marco’s voice came through my earpiece. “Boss, we found a body near the service entrance. Male, approximately fifty. No identification. One gunshot wound. The gray coat is gone.”
“Any cameras?”
“Someone erased the footage from the last twenty minutes.”
I glanced at Isabella. She closed her eyes.
“You know something,” I said.
“I knew Anthony,” she whispered. “Not the way you think. He came to the hospital where my sister was being treated. He paid a bill and asked me to keep a package safe for him.”
“What package?”
“A small metal box. He said if anything happened to him, I was to give it to you only when a person from his past came looking for it.”
“Who?”
“He never told me the name. He said the person would have a scar on his cheek and would give a child a green frog.”
The silence that followed felt colder than the stone around us.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because Anthony said you’d be in danger if you knew. And because I was afraid. I had just lost my sister. Emma was a baby. I needed this job, and I thought if I kept quiet, I could keep her safe.”
“You’ve been working in my house for three years.”
“I know.”
“You’ve watched me grieve my brother.”
Tears gathered in her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
I wanted to be furious. I was furious. But Emma had lifted her head, and she was looking at me with the same green eyes that had just ordered me to kiss a frog.
“Is Mommy in trouble?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
It was the first lie I’d told her.
I ordered a female guard to take Emma to the nursery and stay with her. Emma refused to release the frog until Isabella promised they would finish the wedding later. Then the little girl leaned toward me.
“Mr. Grumpy?”
“What?”
“You have to be brave. Mommy says brave people tell the truth.”
She followed the guard down the hall.
Isabella watched her go. “Anthony said something else. He said the box would prove that the story of his death was a lie.”
My pulse slowed into something dangerous.
“Where is it?”
“In a storage locker under my sister’s name. I can take you there.”
“Not until we know who killed that man and how he got inside my home.”
I sent two teams to check every entrance, and a third to the storage facility. Then I had Isabella moved to a secure room, with a guard outside the door. She accepted it without protest.
At 11:42 p.m., Marco returned with a report from the security system. The man in the gray coat had not entered through a gate. He had been inside the mansion for at least forty minutes before Emma found him.
He’d been hiding in the house.
Worse, the system showed that someone had opened the door to the private archive using my personal access code.
The code only three people knew.
Me.
May you like
Marco.
And Isabella.
