Chapter 2 - READ THE NAMES
Roman stared at the message until the phone screen dimmed.
Emily had never seen a person become more dangerous without moving.
Rain ran from his hair to the collar of his coat. Blood still crossed his palm, but he seemed unaware of it.
“Who sent that?” Emily asked.
“Unknown number.”
“Can your people trace it?”
“Probably not fast enough.”
He unlocked the SUV and motioned her inside.
Emily did not move.
“Margaret is alive.”
“For now.”
“Then we go to the police.”
Roman looked at her.
The expression was not dismissive. It was worse.
It was careful.
“Some of the people involved may be police.”
Emily felt anger rise over fear.
“That sounds like something men like you say when they don’t want police around.”
“Men like me?”
“Rich men with private security and family histories people whisper about.”
Roman accepted the hit.
“My father paid officers, inspectors, judges, union officials, and at least one federal agent. Some of those relationships survived him.”
Emily stared.
“You’re telling me this like it’s weather.”
“I’m telling you because Margaret’s note says my father started whatever this is. If she is right, I don’t know where the contamination ends.”
“Then what do you trust?”
Roman looked at her.
“Very little.”
“That’s a lonely answer.”
“It’s a useful one.”
Emily got into the SUV.
Roman drove them to a private garage beneath the Bellini Grand instead of the main entrance.
Three security men met them.
Roman gave orders quickly.
Lock down procurement records.
Copy every server before anyone could delete anything.
Locate Margaret through traffic cameras, transit cards, phone pings, and hospital admissions.
Discreetly.
No hotel executives were to be warned.
Then Roman turned to Emily.
“You’re staying upstairs.”
She laughed once.
“No.”
His men pretended not to hear.
Roman’s face tightened.
“That was not a suggestion.”
“And I’m not one of your soldiers.”
“You were almost hit by a car.”
“So were you.”
“I can protect myself.”
“That’s exactly the kind of sentence people say right before they make a stupid decision alone.”
One guard coughed.
Roman looked at him.
The guard became fascinated by the ceiling.
Emily continued.
“Margaret left the drive to me.”
“Which makes you a target.”
“Which makes me involved.”
Roman stepped closer.
“You have no idea what involved means in my world.”
“Then maybe your world has been the problem.”
The words landed harder than she intended.
Roman’s jaw moved.
He could have fired her.
He could have ordered someone to remove her.
Instead he exhaled through his nose.
“Come upstairs.”
Roman’s private residence occupied the top two floors of the hotel.
Emily had cleaned suites worth five thousand dollars a night, but his home felt different.
Not luxurious.
Controlled.
Dark wood. Pale stone. Art chosen by someone who did not need to impress strangers. No family photographs.
That bothered her.
People without photographs usually had too much to remember or too much to forget.
A woman in her fifties met them near the kitchen.
“Mr. Bellini.”
“Dr. Marlowe.”
Emily looked at Roman.
“You have a doctor in your house?”
“She lives six blocks away.”
“You called a doctor for your hand?”
“I called her for you.”
“I’m not injured.”
“You hit the pavement.”
Emily opened her mouth.
Roman looked at the doctor.
“She’ll argue.”
Dr. Marlowe smiled.
“I gathered.”
Twenty minutes later, Emily had a bandage on one elbow and Roman had six stitches in his palm.
Then they inserted Margaret’s flash drive into a computer isolated from the hotel network.
The first folders contained invoices.
Emily did not understand them.
Roman did.
Fake laundry vendors.
Fake maintenance vendors.
Insurance reimbursement transfers.
Employee benefit deductions that had left payroll but never reached pension accounts.
He opened a spreadsheet.
Numbers filled the screen.
Years of them.
Millions.
Roman’s face went pale.
“How much?” Emily asked.
“Twenty-eight million that I can see.”
She sat down.
“How do you steal twenty-eight million dollars from employees?”
“Slowly.”
He opened another tab.
A list appeared.
Names.
Hundreds.
Beside each name were numbers representing pension contributions, medical funds, severance reserves, and insurance pools.
Emily recognized some.
Walter Green.
Luis Ortega.
Samuel Price.
Margaret Ellis.
Then she saw another name.
JANE HAYES.
Her breath caught.
Roman turned.
“Your mother?”
Emily stared.
“My mother never worked here.”
“Are you sure?”
“She worked at a hospital laundry.”
“When?”
“Before I was born.”
Roman searched the employee archive.
Jane Hayes appeared.
Bellini Grand.
Temporary laundry attendant.
Employment period: nine months.
Thirty years earlier.
Emily stood so quickly her chair rolled backward.
“That’s wrong.”
Roman opened the scanned personnel file.
There was her mother.
Younger.
Thin.
Beautiful.
Alive.
Emily had not seen that face since she was twelve.
Her mother had died from cancer when Emily was nineteen, after years of refusing to speak about Emily’s father.
Roman’s eyes moved to the employment dates.
“You were born seven months after she left.”
Emily heard the implication.
“No.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Roman opened the benefits transfer log connected to Jane Hayes.
A one-time payment had been issued after her termination.
$250,000.
Emily laughed in disbelief.
“We lived in a basement apartment.”
Roman looked at her.
“She never received this.”
“Then where did it go?”
He traced the transfer.
The money moved through a shell company.
BELLINI DEVELOPMENT SERVICES.
Then to another account.
And another.
Finally, it disappeared into a private trust.
Roman leaned closer to the screen.
His face changed.
“What?”
He did not answer.
“Roman.”
He stood.
“Stay here.”
“No.”
“Emily.”
“You keep saying my name like it’s an order.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then turned the monitor.
The trust was named:
NICHOLAS BELLINI DISCRETIONARY FUND.
Roman’s father.
Emily’s pulse thudded.
“What did your father have to do with my mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I don’t.”
He looked furious now.
Not at her.
At the dead.
“My father had dozens of private accounts. Some legitimate. Some not.”
“Was he married?”
“Yes.”
“To your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Did he cheat on her?”
Roman’s expression became unreadable.
“My father considered fidelity a weakness expected only of other men.”
Emily looked back at Jane’s photograph.
“No.”
Roman did not say the thought aloud.
Neither did she.
The possibility stood between them anyway.
Emily’s father had never existed in her life.
Jane refused to name him.
Every time Emily asked, her mother answered the same way.
Some men are safer as strangers.
At nineteen, Emily had thought it was bitterness.
Now she wondered if it had been fear.
Roman sat back down.
“We need to verify everything before you assume—”
A knock interrupted him.
One of his security men entered.
“Sir. We found something on Margaret.”
Roman stood.
“Where?”
“Her transit card was used two nights ago at Cermak-Chinatown.”
“Camera?”
“We have footage.”
The guard placed a tablet on the table.
Margaret appeared on-screen boarding a bus.
She was alone.
Walking normally.
Emily leaned closer.
“That was after the time she supposedly disappeared.”
“Yes.”
“Then maybe she isn’t kidnapped.”
Roman paused the video.
“Look at her left hand.”
Emily looked.
Margaret was carrying her purse strangely, pressed against her body.
One finger pointed downward.
Roman zoomed in.
Tape.
A strip of white tape across the bottom of her bag.
Words had been written on it.
Three letters.
B-19.
Emily remembered.
Storage room B-19.
Roman’s security team searched it immediately.
Behind a row of obsolete purchasing binders, they found a metal cashbox.
Inside were old photographs.
Hotel ledgers.
Cassette tapes.
And a letter addressed to Roman Bellini.
Roman opened it with his bandaged hand.
The handwriting belonged to his father.
Roman,
If you are reading this, somebody finally found the accounts.
You will be tempted to protect the family name.
Don’t.
There are things I permitted because I told myself the hotel required them. There are other things I did because I was a coward.
One woman paid the price for both.
Jane Hayes.
Emily stopped breathing.
Roman read silently for several seconds more.
Then he handed her the page.
Jane discovered that senior employees were being forced out before pension milestones so their benefits could be diverted through our vendors. She threatened to expose us.
I paid her to leave.
She refused.
Keller handled the rest.
Emily’s eyes jumped to the name.
“Keller?”
Roman’s voice was low.
“Thomas Keller’s father was my father’s operations chief.”
Emily kept reading.
I believed she had left Chicago. Years later I learned she was pregnant when we dismissed her.
Roman looked away.
Emily’s hands shook.
Her mother had been pregnant.
The letter continued.
The child may have been mine.
The room tilted.
Emily gripped the edge of the table.
Roman did not move.
Did not breathe.
Brother.
Sister.
The words were impossible.
Roman’s face went blank in the way people’s faces do when emotion becomes too large to show.
Emily forced herself to keep reading.
I never confirmed it. Jane refused every attempt at contact. If the child is mine, I failed her before she took her first breath.
There is a sealed test in my attorney’s vault.
Roman took the page from Emily.
His eyes scanned the final line.
Then his phone rang.
Security.
He answered.
“What?”
A pause.
Roman’s expression hardened.
“Where?”
Another pause.
“We’re coming.”
He ended the call.
Emily stood.
“What happened?”
“They found Margaret.”
Relief hit too quickly.
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
Emily closed her eyes.
Then Roman continued.
“She’s at Mercy Hospital.”
Emily looked at him.
“What happened to her?”
“She walked into the emergency department twenty minutes ago.”
“That’s good.”
Roman did not respond.
“Roman?”
His gaze moved toward the envelope from his father.
“Margaret says no one kidnapped her.”
Emily’s relief vanished.
“Then the photograph?”
“She says it was staged.”
“By who?”
Roman’s phone buzzed again.
A second image arrived.
Thomas Keller walking into a parking garage.
Time stamped eleven minutes earlier.
Beside him was a man Emily recognized from the hotel lobby.
A Chicago alderman.
Another man stood beside them.
Roman stared.
“Who is that?” Emily asked.
Roman’s voice was quiet.
“My uncle.”
She looked at him.
Roman turned the phone.
At the bottom of the image was a message.
YOU HAVE 24 HOURS TO SIGN THE HOTEL OVER.
OR THE GIRL LEARNS WHAT HER MOTHER REALLY DID.
Emily looked at the photograph of her mother still glowing on the monitor.
Then at Roman.
“What did she do?”
May you like
Roman’s face became unreadable.
“That,” he said, “is what they’re afraid you’ll find out.”
