Chapter 2 - THE MAN INSIDE THE GATE
Leo looked at Arthur and understood something he should have learned years earlier.
Betrayal rarely looked nervous.
Arthur looked annoyed.
He crossed the foyer with his tactical vest half fastened, his salt-and-pepper hair disordered, one hand pressed against the radio at his shoulder.
“Cops are outside,” he said. “Somebody called in a hostage situation.”
Leo said nothing.
Arthur glanced toward the front door.
“They’re demanding we open the gate.”
“Can you?”
Arthur hesitated.
“The motor’s malfunctioning.”
Leo almost smiled.
Clara.
“What about the alarms?”
“Same thing. Whole west perimeter went down sometime after three.”
“How unfortunate.”
Arthur finally looked at him.
Something passed between them.
Small.
Almost invisible.
Arthur had served Leo for eleven years. He had stood beside him at his father’s funeral. He had taken a bullet protecting Leo outside a courthouse. He knew every camera, every escape route, every weakness in the estate.
And now Leo knew exactly what eleven years of loyalty cost.
Fifty thousand dollars.
Arthur lowered his voice.
“I need to get you downstairs.”
“No.”
“Leo—”
“You haven’t called me Leo during an emergency in six years.”
Silence.
Arthur’s eyes changed.
That was enough.
Leo stepped closer.
“Where is Clara?”
Arthur blinked once.
“The maid?”
“You already asked me that.”
“I don’t know.”
“Wrong answer.”
Police sirens screamed beyond the gate.
Arthur’s hand drifted toward his waist.
Leo saw it.
“So this is how you want to do it?”
Arthur stopped.
For one long second neither man moved.
Then Leo’s phone vibrated.
His lieutenant, Marco Bellini.
Leo answered without breaking eye contact.
“Speak.”
“We found something behind the west greenhouse.”
“What?”
“Uniform.”
Leo’s stomach tightened.
“Blood?”
“No.”
“Body?”
“No.”
“Anything else?”
“Shoes. Maid shoes. And a cut section of fence.”
Leo looked at Arthur.
Clara had planned more than he realized.
“Secure it. Tell nobody.”
He hung up.
Arthur’s jaw hardened.
“What did Marco find?”
Leo reached into his pocket.
Arthur saw the movement and stiffened, expecting a weapon.
Instead, Leo removed Clara’s note.
He held it between two fingers.
For the first time, Arthur lost control of his face.
Only for a second.
But Leo saw it.
Arthur knew the handwriting.
“You searched her room,” Arthur said.
It was not a question.
Leo’s voice became dangerously quiet.
“You took fifty thousand dollars to put three Moretti gunmen inside my bedroom.”
Arthur stared at him.
Then he laughed.
A dry, exhausted sound.
“You think this is funny?”
“No.” Arthur shook his head. “I think it’s unbelievable that after everything we’ve survived, I’m going to die because your maid saw me behind a diner.”
“Did she?”
Arthur said nothing.
“Did she see you?”
“She saw enough.”
Leo’s fist struck Arthur before the older man finished speaking.
Arthur crashed against the wall.
A framed painting fell and shattered.
Two guards rushed into the foyer.
Leo raised one hand.
They stopped.
Arthur wiped blood from his mouth.
“You should listen before you kill me.”
“Give me one reason.”
“Because the money wasn’t for you.”
Leo froze.
Arthur smiled without humor.
“The Morettis weren’t paying me to kill you.”
“Three men were coming to my bedroom.”
“Yes.”
“Try again.”
“They were coming for something in your bedroom.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
Leo stepped forward.
Arthur lifted both hands.
“That’s the truth. They wanted access to your private safe. They said nobody was supposed to die unless you woke up.”
“And you believed them?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
Arthur’s expression collapsed into something Leo had never seen on him.
Fear.
Not fear of Leo.
Something else.
“They have my son.”
Leo stopped.
Arthur’s son, Daniel, was twenty-three.
Graduate student.
No involvement in the organization.
Leo had paid his tuition anonymously after Arthur refused to accept help.
“When?”
“Three days ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“They sent me a photograph of him tied to a chair. Then another with today’s newspaper.”
Arthur swallowed.
“They said if I warned you, they’d mail him back to me one piece at a time.”
Leo studied him.
It could be another lie.
Yet grief was difficult to manufacture in the eyes.
“What’s in my safe?”
“That’s what I don’t understand. Money? Passports? Your father’s records?”
Leo’s mind moved quickly.
There was one object in the bedroom safe that nobody outside the Rossi family should have known existed.
A black ledger.
Not the ledger Clara had corrected.
An older one.
His father’s.
Twenty-seven years of transactions, alliances, bribes and debts.
Enough information to destroy families that had spent decades pretending to be legitimate.
Leo turned toward the stairs.
Arthur grabbed his sleeve.
“Leo.”
Leo looked at the hand.
Arthur released him.
“If Clara knows what happened, they’ll hunt her.”
“They already are.”
“How did she get out?”
“I intend to find out.”
They reached Leo’s bedroom.
The safe was behind a panel in the dressing room.
Leo entered the combination.
The steel door opened.
Cash.
Three passports.
A handgun.
His mother’s wedding ring.
And the black ledger.
Still there.
Leo reached for it.
Something fell from between its pages.
A photograph.
He stared.
It showed a younger version of Leo’s father standing outside a courthouse beside another man.
Between them stood a woman.
Leo recognized his father.
He recognized the second man as Carlo Moretti.
But he did not recognize the woman.
On the back, someone had written a date.
Twenty-eight years earlier.
And beneath it:
Evelyn Bennett knows everything.
Arthur looked over his shoulder.
“Who’s Evelyn Bennett?”
Leo turned the photograph over again.
Something about the woman bothered him.
The eyes.
Hazel.
A knock sounded downstairs.
Marco shouted from the foyer.
“Boss!”
Leo hurried out.
Marco was standing beneath the chandelier holding a clear evidence bag.
Inside was a cheap brown wig.
Leo stopped.
Clara’s mouse-brown hair.
Except it wasn’t hair.
It had never been her hair.
Marco looked unsettled.
“We found this with the uniform.”
Leo took the bag.
For six months he had watched Clara pin that hair into a severe bun.
Six months.
He had never once seen her with it down.
Now he understood why.
Arthur whispered, “Who the hell did you hire?”
Leo looked toward the sunrise spilling through the windows.
For the first time since finding the note, he considered a possibility more dangerous than Clara being hunted.
May you like
Maybe Clara had entered his house already knowing exactly who he was.
And maybe saving his life had never been part of her original plan.
