Chapter 2 - THE MAN IN THE HALLWAY
I didn’t look at the guard right away.
I kept my eyes on my four-year-old daughter.
Lucia’s small hand was still gripping mine, her knuckles white. She was shaking. The child who hadn’t spoken a single word in fourteen months had just shattered my entire reality.
Mommy knew the driver. That man.
I finally turned my head.
Standing in the marble archway was Marcus.
Marcus had been on my payroll for five years. He was ex-military. Quiet. Efficient. He was the man I trusted to guard the perimeter of my estate, the man who had supposedly been off-duty the day Isabella died.
Our eyes met.
For a fraction of a second, Marcus didn’t move. He tried to hold his mask of professional indifference. But he was a man who understood violence, and he saw it waking up in my eyes.
He didn’t draw his weapon. He knew he’d never clear the holster before I put a bullet in his chest.
Instead, he turned and ran.
“Take the girls!” I roared at Rosa.
I didn’t wait to see if she obeyed. I drew the pistol from beneath my jacket and sprinted after him.
The heavy thud of my boots echoed through the massive hallways of the estate. Marcus was fast, heading for the service doors that led to the garage. But he was running in a panic. I was running with fourteen months of suffocating grief turning into pure rage.
He hit the heavy oak doors, shoving them open into the cool evening air.
I cleared the doorway three seconds later.
He was fumbling with the keys to a black SUV.
“Marcus!”
He froze.
I had my gun leveled directly at his head. My finger was flush against the trigger.
“Turn around,” I said.
My voice didn’t sound like my own. It sounded like the man I was before I met Isabella. The monster the city feared.
Marcus slowly turned, his hands raised to his shoulders. His face was pale.
“Mr. Russo. Dominic, listen to me—”
“Get on your knees.”
He dropped to the concrete.
I walked toward him, the barrel of my gun never wavering. My mind was screaming. Daddy killed Mommy. That’s what Lucia had said.
“My daughter says her mother knew you were driving that day,” I said, my voice eerily calm. “I was told the driver was a cartel foot soldier who burned in the wreckage.”
Marcus swallowed hard. “Dominic, it’s not what you think.”
“Then make me understand, Marcus. Because right now, I have three silent daughters in there, and the first thing one of them says is that you were in the car.”
I pressed the barrel against his forehead.
“You have three seconds.”
“She paid me!” Marcus blurted out, squeezing his eyes shut.
I froze. “What?”
“Isabella! She paid me to drive her that day! She paid me to take her off the usual route!”
My hand trembled. “You’re lying. She was going home.”
“She wasn’t going home, Dominic. She was running.”
I stared at him, my heart pounding against my ribs. “Running from what?”
“From you.”
The words hit me like a physical blow.
“She knew about the Mendoza hit,” Marcus choked out, sweat pouring down his face. “She found out they were coming for you. But she also found out someone inside your crew was feeding them information. She didn’t trust your security. She trusted me because I owed her.”
I lowered the gun half an inch. “Owed her for what?”
Marcus reached slowly into his shirt. My finger tightened on the trigger, but he only pulled out a silver chain.
Dangling from it was a diamond cross.
Isabella’s cross.
“My sister needed a transplant,” Marcus whispered. “Isabella paid for it in secret. She asked me to drive her to the airstrip that afternoon. She was taking the girls to Italy. To hide until the war was over.”
Answer one: Isabella wasn’t ambushed randomly. She was fleeing.
Open two: Who told the cartel where she would be? And why did Lucia think I killed her?
“If she was running,” I said, my voice dangerously low, “how did the cartel find you?”
“They didn’t,” Marcus said, looking up at me with sheer terror. “The cars that boxed us in… they weren’t Mendoza’s men, Dominic. They were yours.”
My blood ran cold.
Before I could process the words, a sharp crack echoed through the garage.
Marcus’s chest exploded outward.
He slumped forward, dead before he hit the concrete.
I spun around, raising my weapon.
A shadow moved on the roof of the guest house. A sniper.
I fired twice, covering my retreat as I backed toward the heavy oak doors. The shooter was gone.
I looked back at Marcus’s body, his blood pooling around Isabella’s silver cross.
My own men.
Someone inside my house had ordered the hit on my wife.
I shoved the doors open and ran back to the kitchen.
Rosa was gone.
The girls were gone.
Only Emily, the maid, was standing there. She was holding a crumpled piece of paper, her hands shaking violently.
I grabbed her arm. “Where are they?”
“Rosa took them to the safe room,” Emily gasped. “Dominic… you need to see this.”
She unfolded the paper.
It was a drawing. Crayon on printer paper. Lucia’s drawing.
It showed a car crash. A woman covering three little girls.
And standing outside the car, holding a gun, was a stick figure wearing a very specific, unique gold watch.
I recognized the watch instantly.
May you like
I had given it to my underboss, Silvio, ten years ago.
And at the bottom of the drawing, in messy, childlike letters, Lucia had written: Uncle Silvio.
