Chapter 4 - THE CHAIR AT THE END OF THE TABLE
The first attempt to force Dominic's signature came disguised as a family lunch.
Leo called on Friday morning to say that their aunt Emilia had arrived from Syracuse and wanted to see him. She was seventy-two, stubborn, and had raised Dominic for eighteen months after his mother died. Refusing her would be an act of cruelty he could not justify. Dominic agreed to receive her in the dining room, on the condition that business stay outside the door.
At one o'clock, Emilia entered carrying a plastic container of lemon cookies and wearing a coat covered with little drops of rain. She kissed Dominic on both cheeks, inspected his face, and then swatted his shoulder.
"You haven't been eating," she said.
"I've been eating."
"Coffee doesn't count."
Clara liked her immediately.
Emilia asked Clara to sit with them rather than hovering by the wall. She had heard about the engagement but did not assume the rumors were true.
"Do you actually want to marry my nephew?" she asked over soup.
Clara looked at Dominic. "We haven't decided what we want."
"Good," Emilia said. "That's at least one honest answer in this family."
Leo arrived twenty minutes late, carrying what he described as a packet of emergency company documents. Carmine followed with his usual leather case. The cookies were still on the table when Carmine began discussing authority transfers.
"You promised this wasn't business," Dominic said.
Leo spread his hands. "I did. Carmine came because the insurer needs an answer."
"Then the insurer can call my attorney."
Carmine's smile tightened. "We are trying to protect your interests."
Emilia put down her spoon. "Then stop treating him like furniture."
Clara watched Leo's jaw work. He was not afraid of Dominic today, at least not in the familiar way. He seemed afraid of time. Every few minutes he looked toward the clock above the sideboard.
Carmine placed a document beside Dominic's plate. This one authorized the movement of valuable equipment from Pier Seventeen to a storage facility across the river. Attached was a list of machinery. Clara scanned it, looking for the damaged service lift and garage cameras. Neither appeared.
"Why isn't there an inventory from the fire marshal?" she asked.
"Because the site remains under investigation," Carmine said.
"Then how can you know what's safe to remove?"
"Our engineers assessed it before the accident."
"Which engineers?"
Leo exhaled. "Not again."
"That's what I'd like to know," Dominic said. "Which engineers?"
Carmine closed the folder. "You don't need to make an enemy of everyone trying to help you."
Dominic leaned forward. "I don't. Only the ones who won't answer a question."
The meal ended without signatures. Emilia stayed behind, helping Clara put the cookies in a tin. She looked out at Dominic speaking to Leo in the corridor.
"He's doing something foolish," she said softly.
Clara stopped. "What do you mean?"
"Dominic. When he gets frightened, he decides nobody else is allowed to know why. He thinks secrecy is the same as love. It isn't."
Clara considered asking whether Emilia believed the paralysis, but the older woman seemed to have more urgent things to say.
"Don't make yourself responsible for fixing him," Emilia said. "A grown man can repair his own mistakes."
In the afternoon a special safety inspection took place at Blackthorne House. After the bombing, Mara had hired an independent security consultant, Sera West, who had no history with the Russo businesses. Sera carried no weapons, wore practical boots, and kept a notebook full of diagrams. She inspected windows, exits, and the old service tunnel connecting the kitchen wing to the detached garage.
"This tunnel is blocked by a steel fire door," she said. "Why?"
Mara answered, "It was closed after the explosion."
"It can also trap staff if the main corridor fills with smoke. There should be a secondary egress procedure."
Sera asked the cook, the nurse, and Clara whether they knew another way out. None of them did. She added the tunnel to a written report and insisted the temporary evacuation plan include an alternate route through the east garden.
Dominic listened to the report in the study. He had once regarded safety instructions as obstacles to moving freely. Now he saw Clara's face when she learned that a locked door might turn a routine evacuation into a trap.
"Fix it," he told Mara.
"We need a qualified fire-door contractor and city approval."
"Then get them. No shortcuts."
Clara asked Sera if employees could receive the full evacuation plan. Sera said they should. Dominic agreed and gave her authority to brief everyone, including junior kitchen staff.
It was a small decision in an enormous house. To Clara, it mattered more than the marble floors.
Later she visited Nina Vale with the attorney's copy of the engagement agreement. Nina had obtained a statement from Dominic's counsel confirming that no legal marriage obligation existed and that the debt settlement was unconditional. A release had also been sent to the original lender, although Nina was still tracing the person who had acquired the claim afterward.
"Someone bought your father's note three days before the engagement," Nina said. "The buyer was a company named Merrin Holdings. They paid more than the amount outstanding."
"Why would anyone do that?"
"For leverage. Or for access. We don't yet know."
Clara thought of the Holloway employee at the hospital, the questions about Dominic's legs, and her father's willingness to disclose anything that might gain him another reprieve. The debt had not simply brought her into the house. It had made her an instrument another person could attempt to use.
"Can we find the person behind Merrin?" she asked.
"We'll make the lawful requests. If the threats continue, Detective Ward can pursue the records that require legal process."
Clara thanked her. As she rose to leave, Nina added, "You don't have to become a detective to deserve safety."
"I know."
"Do you?"
Clara paused. "I'm learning."
At five thirty, Detective Ward arrived with an update: the garage's deleted maintenance logs had been partially recovered from a third-party backup. A badge assigned to an employee named Julian Moss had opened the lift at three eleven, but Julian had resigned months earlier. Someone had continued using his credential.
"Who deactivated it?" Dominic asked.
"That's the problem," Ward said. "Nobody did. According to the company policy, Carmine's office was supposed to review dormant accounts every thirty days. The account remained active."
"That could be incompetence," Clara said.
"Exactly," Ward replied. "Or deliberate. We need more than an open account to distinguish them."
Dominic found that reasoning frustrating. He could make men confess debts with a look. He could not demand certainty from evidence that refused to supply it. For once he did not mistake frustration for permission to intervene.
That night, Clara took a tray to his room because Evelyn was assisting the cook with an injured wrist. Dominic had left the bedroom door partly open. As she approached, she heard a sound like a shoe striking the floor, followed by a sharp breath.
"Dominic?" she called.
"Come in."
He sat beside the bed in the wheelchair, his expression strained. One slipper lay on the carpet. The other rested near the bathroom door. The distance between them was nearly ten feet.
Clara stared at the slipper, then at the chair.
"Did you throw it?" she asked.
"I knocked it off."
"How did it get over there?"
He looked toward the bathroom. "I don't know."
She bent to retrieve it and noticed a footprint in the condensation on the polished tile near the door. A bare adult foot, complete with heel and toes. It was fresh enough that the water had not yet evaporated.
"Evelyn came in earlier," Dominic said before she asked.
"Evelyn was wearing shoes."
Their eyes met. Clara felt an old warning stirring in her. She had spent years being told that what she saw was not what she had seen. She would not let it happen again.
"Are you hiding something from me?" she asked.
Dominic's throat tightened. He could have ended it then, on a quiet evening, with a confession that might still have left room for forgiveness.
"Yes," he said.
The honesty startled them both.
"About your injury?"
He looked down. "I need to explain it properly."
"Then explain it now."
Before he could speak, Mara knocked sharply. "Boss. There's been an incident at Pier Seventeen. The site supervisor reported smoke in the old maintenance corridor. Fire crews are on the way."
Dominic reached for his phone. Clara stepped aside, her face closed.
"This conversation isn't over," she said.
"I know."
May you like
She left before he could ask her to stay. Alone for a moment, Dominic looked at the uncovered footprint and understood that the deception he had considered a tactical necessity was becoming an ordinary lie, the kind that could damage someone even if no bomb ever exploded again.
At the end of the hallway, Clara stopped beside the window and stared into the grounds. She could see the distant gate, the wet driveway, and the silhouette of a guard turning beneath an umbrella. She had thought the greatest danger in Blackthorne House was violence arriving from outside. Now she was beginning to understand how much damage could be done by people insisting that an uncomfortable fact remain unsaid. She did not know why Dominic might have lied about his body. She knew only that her concern had been real, that she had watched him struggle through meals and appointments, and that she deserved the truth before she gave him another hour of her trust.
