Chapter 3 - A HOUSE FULL OF EYES
Dominic did not answer immediately.
On the other end of the line, Vincent Russo gave a soft chuckle.
“You still there?”
“I’m here.”
“Good. For a second I thought your manners had finally died.”
Dominic kept walking.
Sarah stayed beside him. Nico moved several steps ahead, one hand beneath his jacket, already issuing silent orders through an earpiece.
The Russo estate had been built to impress people who needed impressing and intimidate people who needed intimidating. Its limestone walls were thick. Its security system had cost more than some Manhattan apartments. Cameras watched every exterior approach.
Dominic had never considered that the most dangerous person might already know how all of it worked.
“What are you doing here, Uncle?”
“Breakfast.”
“You don’t visit for breakfast.”
“I could start.”
“You could call first.”
“I did.”
Dominic entered the gallery outside the sunroom.
Through the glass doors, Lucy sat cross-legged on a rug beside Bernadette, arranging yellow roses into a silver bowl. One torn red shoe had fallen off. Her small bare toes flexed against the carpet.
She was safe.
For now.
Dominic stopped where she could not see him.
Vincent said, “Gabriel tells me your gate man is being difficult.”
“Good. That’s what I pay him for.”
“Open the gate.”
“No.”
The silence on the line changed.
Vincent’s charm never disappeared completely. It simply became thinner.
“You planning to keep your uncle standing in the driveway?”
“You’re not in the driveway.”
“No?”
“You’re outside the perimeter.”
Vincent laughed again, but there was no warmth in it now.
“Your father hated when you split hairs.”
“My father hated a lot of things.”
“Especially secrets.”
Dominic looked through the sunroom glass at Lucy.
“Funny,” he said. “I was just thinking about those.”
Vincent said nothing.
Then: “Open the gate, Dom.”
“No.”
Dominic ended the call.
Sarah stared at him.
“That’s your plan?”
“It’s the first ten seconds of my plan.”
“What happens in the next ten?”
Dominic looked at Nico.
“Kill the house network.”
Nico frowned. “All of it?”
“All of it.”
“We lose interior cameras.”
“So does anyone watching them.”
Sarah’s eyes moved from one man to the other.
“You think someone is watching from inside?”
Dominic thought about the gate. About Vincent arriving minutes after a key fell from an old stuffed rabbit in a closed dining room.
There were only four people in that room when it happened.
Dominic.
Sarah.
Lucy.
And, soon after, Nico and Bernadette.
Yet Vincent knew.
“Not think,” Dominic said. “Know.”
The house lights flickered.
A second later, the tiny green indicators above the corridor cameras went dark.
Nico pulled out a second phone.
“Local backup only. No cloud connection, no remote access.”
“Good.”
Sarah touched the glass door.
“I’m taking Lucy.”
“Where?”
“Away from here.”
“No.”
Her head snapped toward him.
Dominic raised one hand before she could explode.
“You are not trapped here. You can leave whenever you want.”
“Then move.”
“But you are not driving through a front gate where Gabriel Voss is waiting.”
That stopped her.
“I have another exit,” Dominic said.
Sarah’s face tightened. “Of course you do.”
“Judge me later.”
“I’ve started already.”
Despite everything, Nico coughed to hide what might have been a laugh.
Dominic ignored him.
He opened the sunroom door.
Lucy looked up.
“You brought him back.”
Dominic realized he was still holding Mr. Button.
“Yes.”
He crossed the room and handed the rabbit to her.
Lucy hugged it instantly.
“You promised.”
“I did.”
Sarah came in behind him and knelt, checking Lucy’s face, hands, arms, as if danger might have left a mark without announcing itself.
Bernadette watched Dominic.
“You need to talk to me,” he said.
“I know.”
“Now.”
Bernadette looked at Lucy.
Dominic nodded toward the far side of the room.
Sarah gave him a look that made clear she would listen to every word anyway.
Fine.
Dominic lowered his voice.
“You recognized the rabbit.”
“Yes.”
“When was the last time you saw it?”
Bernadette folded her hands.
“The morning Elena left the estate.”
“That was three days before the crash.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me she took it?”
Bernadette’s gaze sharpened. “Because a twenty-eight-year-old woman does not need permission to pack a stuffed animal.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No. You asked why I didn’t report your sister’s luggage to you.”
Sarah looked down, hiding the smallest smile.
Dominic felt outnumbered in his own house.
“Did Elena tell you where she was going?”
“No.”
“Did she tell you she was pregnant?”
Bernadette closed her eyes.
That was answer enough.
Dominic stared at her.
“You knew.”
“Yes.”
A familiar heat rose through him.
“How long?”
“About two months.”
“You knew for two months and said nothing?”
“She asked me not to.”
“I was her brother.”
“She was not your property.”
There it was again.
The same accusation Sarah had made.
Not in the same words, but close enough.
Dominic looked away.
From outside came the faint mechanical growl of vehicles moving.
Nico checked his phone.
“Vincent’s backing away from the gate.”
“Leaving?” Dominic asked.
“Not yet. Two vehicles are repositioning.”
Dominic hated that answer.
“Continue,” he told Bernadette.
She looked at Sarah.
“Elena came to me because she was scared.”
“Of the father?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
“She didn’t know.”
Dominic’s jaw tightened.
“She suspected somebody was moving money through Russo Holdings. Large amounts. She found transfers hidden inside real estate acquisitions.”
Nico looked up.
“What kind of transfers?”
“Offshore entities. Consulting invoices. Properties bought high and sold low. I didn’t understand all of it.”
“But Elena did,” Dominic said.
“She was better with numbers than your father ever admitted.”
That was true.
Elena had studied forensic accounting for exactly one year before Carlo Russo told her a Russo woman did not investigate Russo books.
She had quit the program the next day.
Or pretended to.
“What did she find?”
Bernadette’s voice dropped.
“She believed someone was selling information about the family’s legitimate businesses to competitors and using Russo accounts to wash the payments.”
Sarah frowned. “That gets someone killed?”
“In our family?” Dominic said. “It can.”
Bernadette continued.
“Elena copied something. She wouldn’t tell me what. She only said she needed proof before she came to you.”
“Why not come to me first?”
“Because she believed the person responsible was close to you.”
Dominic thought of Vincent again.
The uncle who had taught him to drive.
The uncle who had taken him to Yankee Stadium when Carlo forgot his thirteenth birthday.
The uncle who had signed legal documents beside his father’s hospital bed.
He hated how easy suspicion became once grief gave it a shape.
“What did you do?”
“I gave her cash and told her about a cottage in Connecticut that belonged to a friend.”
“Did she go there?”
“I don’t know. She left before dawn. Three days later, they told us her car exploded.”
Dominic’s phone vibrated.
A text from Vincent.
YOU’RE MAKING THIS HARDER THAN IT NEEDS TO BE.
Dominic showed Nico.
Sarah saw it too.
“This is insane,” she whispered.
“No,” Dominic said. “This is pressure.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Pressure has a purpose.”
The sound came a moment later.
A sharp crack from outside.
Then another.
The sunroom window starred near the top corner.
Sarah screamed Lucy’s name.
Dominic moved before thought.
He crossed the distance in two strides, grabbed Lucy and dropped behind the heavy stone planter beneath the window.
Another crack.
Glass burst inward.
Nico drew his weapon and shoved Bernadette behind a sofa.
Sarah hit the floor beside Dominic.
Lucy began crying.
Mr. Button was pinned between her and Dominic’s chest.
“It’s okay,” Sarah said breathlessly. “Baby, look at me. Look at Mama.”
Dominic listened.
No more shots.
Nico spoke into his radio.
“North lawn. Find the source. Nobody fires unless they have a clean identification.”
Dominic looked at the broken window.
A small metal object lay among the glass.
Not a bullet.
He knew before he touched it.
A steel ball bearing.
Fired from a high-powered slingshot or pneumatic launcher.
A warning.
Not an assassination attempt.
Nico reached the same conclusion.
“They wanted the glass broken.”
Dominic’s phone buzzed again.
Vincent.
This time the text said:
LAST CHANCE. BRING ME THE RABBIT.
Sarah read it over his shoulder.
The look she gave Dominic contained no fear now.
Only accusation.
“He knows exactly what he wants.”
“Yes.”
“Which means Elena hid something else in it.”
Dominic looked down.
Lucy clutched Mr. Button against her chest so tightly the rabbit’s bent ear was folded under her chin.
The seam where the key had fallen out gaped slightly.
Dominic’s mind raced.
The key could not be the only thing.
Vincent would not bring three SUVs to a guarded estate for a key he could not know had survived.
Unless he knew what the key opened.
Or unless he feared something else was still inside the toy.
“Lucy,” Dominic said gently.
She sniffed.
“What?”
“I need to ask you a question about Mr. Button.”
Sarah stiffened, but did not stop him.
“Has he ever had anything strange inside him?”
Lucy looked confused.
“He has stuffing.”
“Anything hard?”
She thought.
Then she touched the rabbit’s missing eye.
“Sometimes he clicks.”
Dominic felt every muscle in his body go still.
“What clicks?”
“When I shake him.”
Sarah stared at the toy.
“I thought it was the loose stuffing knot.”
Dominic held out his hand.
This time Lucy gave him the rabbit without arguing.
He lifted it near his ear and shook it once.
Nothing.
Again.
A faint tick came from the head.
Nico heard it too.
Dominic pressed his thumb around the empty eye socket.
The fabric beneath it felt stiff.
Not cotton.
Something small and solid had been sewn into the rabbit’s skull.
Sarah whispered, “Oh my God.”
Dominic looked toward the shattered window.
His uncle was still somewhere beyond the gate.
Waiting.
“Safe room,” Dominic said.
Nico nodded.
Sarah picked up Lucy.
Bernadette rose shakily.
Dominic carried the rabbit.
They moved through the private library, behind a wall panel and down a narrow concrete stairway built by Dominic’s father during a period when Carlo had been convinced federal agents were going to raid the estate at dawn.
The safe room had no windows, an independent phone line and a steel door thick enough to make the outside world theoretical.
Once everyone was inside, Nico locked it.
Dominic placed Mr. Button beneath a bright work lamp.
Sarah hovered beside him.
“Don’t destroy it.”
“I won’t.”
Lucy stood beside Bernadette, watching with watery eyes.
Dominic found a small sewing kit in the emergency cabinet.
His hands hesitated over the rabbit.
He had repaired this toy once when he was seventeen.
Now, twenty years later, he was about to cut it open because his dead sister had trusted a piece of cloth more than she had trusted her own family.
He slid the tiny scissors beneath the stitching around the missing eye.
One thread.
Then another.
The fabric loosened.
Something metallic glinted inside.
Dominic used tweezers to pull it free.
It was not a drive.
Not a chip.
Not evidence anyone in the room understood.
It was a tiny silver cylinder no bigger than a vitamin capsule.
One end unscrewed.
Inside was a tightly rolled strip of paper.
Dominic unfolded it carefully.
There were only seven words, written in Elena’s unmistakable handwriting.
DON’T TRUST VINCENT. ASK WHO SIGNED THE CREMATION.
Nobody spoke.
Sarah looked at Dominic.
Nico said, “Cremation?”
Dominic stared at the note.
Elena had not been cremated.
He had stood in a cemetery while a mahogany coffin was lowered into the ground.
He had watched dirt hit the lid.
He had paid for the grave.
Bernadette whispered, “Dominic.”
His phone vibrated one more time.
This time it was not Vincent.
It was the estate security chief.
Nico answered on speaker.
“Sir, the SUVs are gone.”
Dominic looked at the note.
“Any breach?”
A pause.
Then the security chief said, “Not at the perimeter.”
Dominic heard the distinction.
“Where?”
“Family cemetery.”
The safe room became very quiet.
May you like
The man continued.
“Someone dug up Elena Russo’s grave.”
