Chapter 5 - The Paper Trail
By dawn, Pier 42 was cordoned off by private security teams loyal to Roman, scrubbing the scene before the NYPD harbor patrol could sniff around. We retreated to Roman’s private penthouse in Tribeca—a fortified sanctuary equipped with reinforced steel doors, bulletproof windows, and biometric scanners.
I sat on the white leather sofa, wrapped in a dark cashmere blanket, a steaming mug of tea untouched in front of me. Roman stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows, his phone pressed to his ear, his voice low and dangerous.
“Lock down every Caldwell safehouse in Queens,” Roman commanded into the receiver. “If Carlo shows his face at any of the clubs, detain him. Do not execute. I want him alive.”
He hung up, tossing the phone onto the glass coffee table. He walked over to me, kneeling so that his gaze was level with mine. The ruthless mob boss looked tired, shadows circling his eyes.
“Your brother is safe, Tessa,” Roman said softly. “I just spoke with the chief of neurology. Leo had his first physical therapy session this morning. He managed to move two toes on his right foot. The doctors believe with consistent therapy, he could walk again within a year.”
A sob caught in my throat. For three years, every doctor had told me Leo was permanently paralyzed. Roman had found the one specialist in the world capable of reversing the damage.
“Why are you doing this for him?” I asked, tears finally slipping down my cheeks. “You don't owe me anything. You never did.”
Roman reached out, his thumb gently wiping away a tear from my cheek. His touch was unexpectedly tender, completely at odds with the violence he had dealt out hours earlier.
“I owe you everything, Tessa,” Roman admitted quietly. “The night Leo was hit, I arrived at the intersection thirty seconds after the crash. I saw you kneeling in the street, covered in your brother’s blood, screaming for an ambulance that was taking too long. I knew that truck had been meant for me. I wanted to pay for everything right then, but Carlo warned me that if Moretti saw me funding the victims, they would know Julian had hit the wrong car and come back to finish the job.”
I stared at him, piecing the horror together. “So you had your HR department reach out to me six months later with a high-paying secretarial job.”
Roman nodded slowly. “I wanted to keep you close so I could protect you and ensure you had an income. But I didn't realize how much the medical bills were bleeding you dry. I didn't know because Carlo was filtering your financial requests. He made sure you stayed desperate.”
A sudden realization struck me like a physical blow. “The missing twenty thousand dollars.”
“What about it?”
I threw off the blanket, marching toward Roman’s home workstation. “Carlo didn't just frame me to get me fired. He knew I do the bi-weekly reconciliation of the offshore accounts. Roman, log me into the mainframe right now.”
Roman typed his master passphrase into the terminal. Within seconds, I brought up the Caldwell family's encrypted ledger. For three years, I had memorized the cadence of Roman’s money flow—the shell companies in Panama, the real estate holding firms in Delaware.
I traced the twenty-thousand-dollar withdrawal from three days ago.
“Look,” I pointed at the glowing monitor. “The money didn't leave your account as cash. It was broken into four micro-transfers of five thousand dollars each, funneled through an LLC called ‘St. Jude Logistics.’”
Roman’s eyes narrowed. “Who owns St. Jude Logistics?”
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“It’s registered to an anonymous trust in the Cayman Islands,” I said, fingers flying across the keys, bypassing the proxy servers. “But the routing number for the processing fee goes straight to a private account at Manhattan Chase. Account holder... Julian Vance.”
Roman let out a low, terrifying laugh. “Carlo wasn't stealing money from me. He was paying Moretti’s hitman to finish the job he started three years ago.”
