Chapter 5 - THE BRASS KEY
We crashed into the study, the heavy oak doors slamming shut behind us. I immediately threw the deadbolts and slid the iron security bar into place. Outside, the muffled staccato of gunfire echoed through the courtyard as Marco’s rogue guards engaged in a bloody firefight with Lorenzo’s loyalists.
I set Emma down gently on the leather sofa. She wasn’t crying anymore; she was perfectly still, staring at the door with wide, terrified eyes. The trauma of my world had already infected her innocence. That realization fueled a cold, burning rage inside me.
My mother rushed to a cabinet, pulling out a first-aid kit. Sophia collapsed into a wingback chair, wrapping her arms tightly around herself, rocking back and forth.
“They’re going to kill us,” Sophia whispered, her voice fractured. “Because of a coat. Because of my husband. I brought this into your house.”
“You brought the truth into my house,” I corrected her, walking over to the heavy mahogany desk at the center of the room. I looked down at the brass key clutched in my bloody hand. It was stained with Marco’s blood.
“Alessandro,” my mother said breathlessly, locking the reinforced shutters over the windows. “Marco said that key belongs to a safety deposit box. At the bank. We’re trapped in here. The key is useless right now.”
I stared at the intricate grooves of the brass key. Something felt wrong. David was an accountant. A meticulous man who knew the Moretti family’s reach.
“If David knew my family controlled half the banks in New York, he wouldn't put the evidence in a deposit box,” I muttered, tracing the metal. “He would hide it somewhere the Morettis wouldn’t dare look. Somewhere sacred.”
I walked over to Sophia. I knelt in front of her, forcing her to look at me.
“Sophia, look at me. Look at my eyes.”
She blinked through her tears, her breathing shallow.
“Where did you meet David?” I asked.
“What?” she choked out.
“Where did you meet him? Where did he propose? What place meant the most to him?”
“St. Jude’s,” she whispered. “The old Catholic church in Brooklyn. We volunteered there. He… he helped restore the antique furniture in the rectory.”
My eyes widened. I looked at the brass key again. It wasn't a modern, laser-cut bank key. It was old. Heavy. Brass.
“He restored furniture,” I repeated, turning toward the massive, antique grandfather clock standing in the corner of my study.
My father had purchased that clock from a bankrupt parish in Brooklyn exactly two years ago—right around the time David died. Lorenzo had handled the estate sale.
I rushed to the clock. I examined the small keyhole on the glass door protecting the pendulum. It was an antique lock.
I slid the brass key in. It turned with a heavy, satisfying click.
I pulled the glass door open. Taped to the back of the massive brass pendulum was a thick, brown leather ledger.
“He didn't hide it in a bank,” I said, pulling the ledger free. “He hid it inside the very antique my father bought. He hid it right under our noses.”
I carried the ledger to the desk and opened it. The pages were filled with David’s neat, meticulous handwriting. Columns of numbers, dates, and offshore routing numbers.
But as I flipped to the final page, the numbers stopped. Instead, there was a handwritten letter.
“If you are reading this, I am dead,” the letter began. “Lorenzo Moretti is stealing from his father, but he is not the mastermind. He is being blackmailed. The true architect of this takeover is someone the Moretti family trusts blindly. Someone who orchestrated the alliance with the Romanos.”
Before I could read the name at the bottom of the page, the study phone rang.
It was an internal line. The holding room.
I picked it up. “Speak.”
“Alessandro,” Isabella’s voice came through, completely calm, stripped of all her previous panic. “Have you figured it out yet?”
“I’m reading the ledger right now, Isabella.”
“Good,” she purred. “Then you know Marco and Lorenzo are just idiots playing with guns outside your door. But you should look out the front window, darling. My father didn’t leave the property.”
I dropped the phone and ran to the window, peering through a small slit in the reinforced shutters.
Outside the front gates, ten black SUVs were parked in a semicircle. Dozens of heavily armed Romano soldiers were taking positions behind the vehicles. And standing in the center of the driveway was Carmine Romano.
He was holding a megaphone.
“Moretti!” Carmine’s voice boomed through the glass. “You have five minutes to send my daughter out! And send out the ledger with her! If you don’t, we burn the mansion to the ground with all of you inside!”
And then, Carmine threw something onto the driveway.
It was a delicate, blood-stained white silk scarf.
May you like
I felt the air leave my lungs. I spun around.
My mother was gone. The back door of the study, leading to the servant’s corridor, was swinging wide open.
