Chapter 2 - Debts of the Dead
The rain had graduated into a punishing downpour by the time Dominic ushered us through the side exit of Beluchi’s.
He hadn’t allowed me to call another cab. When I protested, he simply stood over me, his hand hovering near the small of my back without actually touching me, a polite barrier between my family and the street.
“You put your daughter in a yellow cab with a stranger once tonight,” he said quietly, his voice cutting through the hiss of the storm. “You won’t do it twice.”
A long, matte-black Mercedes Maybach idled at the curb. The instant Dominic stepped under the awning, the rear door opened. A broad-shouldered man with a scarred jaw and an umbrella held the door, his eyes never rising to meet Dominic’s, but tracking every pedestrian within thirty yards with the mechanical vigilance of a sentry gun.
“Get in,” Dominic murmured.
“Where are you taking us?” I pulled Lily behind me.
“To your apartment on 4th Street,” he answered immediately. “Where else would I take you?”
He knew my address. He knew my husband. He had known before I ever picked up the phone to agree to my sister’s blind date.
The interior of the sedan was silent, smelling of costly leather, cedarwood, and the faint, unmistakable tang of gun oil. Lily climbed into the center seat, clutching Mr. Buttons, her eyes wide as she pressed the buttons that adjusted the ambient neon strip along the door panel.
“Mommy, look! It turns purple like grape juice!”
“Sit back and put your seatbelt on, Lily,” I said, my voice brittle.
Dominic slid into the seat opposite us, his long legs angled to avoid brushing my knees. He pulled out a linen handkerchief and handed it to me.
“Your jacket is soaked,” he observed.
I stared at the handkerchief. It was immaculate, monogrammed with a small, stylized *M* in silver thread. I didn’t take it. I clamped my hands together in my lap to stop them from shaking.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“You know who I am. You read the name when your sister booked the table.”
“The papers call you a real estate developer, Mr. Moretti,” I said coldly. “The detectives who questioned me four years ago called your family something else entirely.”
A faint, mirthless curve touched his lips. “Detectives in this city call anyone who doesn't answer their questions whatever helps them close a file.”
“Don’t play games with me. Julian worked for an accounting firm in Midtown. He audited municipal bonds. He was an ordinary man.”
“Julian was a genius with numbers,” Dominic corrected, leaning forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees. The posture brought him closer, his physical presence suffocatingly large in the enclosed luxury of the car. “And he was never ordinary. If he were ordinary, he’d still be alive, Elena. He’d be taking the 6 train home to an unremarkable house, eating unremarkable dinners.”
“Don’t talk about him like that.”
“I talk about him with the respect he earned,” Dominic snapped, the steel in his voice suddenly breaking through the polish. “Julian didn't audit municipal bonds for the last eighteen months of his life. He audited my books.”
The air turned to glass.
“What?”
“Five years ago, a faction within my organization—men loyal to Matteo Bellini—began laundering dirty capital through clean infrastructure projects. Ports, concrete, school construction. Julian discovered the discrepancy. He came to me directly instead of going to Bellini. He knew what Bellini was, and he knew what would happen if the books were made public before we could purge the rot.”
Dominic paused, his dark eyes flickering toward Lily, who was busy humming a tuneless song while tracing the rain streaks on the bulletproof window.
“Julian saved three hundred people from an investigation that would have ended in blood across five boroughs,” Dominic continued, lowering his voice until only I could hear. “He kept the records. But Bellini found out. Julian ran. He tried to get back to you that night, to pick up you and Lily from the clinic. He never made it to the bridge.”
“You killed him,” I whispered, horror rising in my throat like bile. “You let him take the fall.”
“If I had wanted Julian dead, Elena, his body would never have been found on that asphalt in Red Hook,” Dominic said, and the absolute lack of emotion in the statement made it a thousand times more terrifying than a shout. “I spent four years hunting the men who ran his car off the road. The last one was put in the East River two months ago.”
“Then why are you here?” I choked out, tears finally breaking past my eyelashes, hot and furious. “Why now? Why me?”
“Because Julian took something with him that didn't belong to Bellini, and it didn't belong to me,” Dominic said. “An encryption key. A hard drive containing the complete financial architecture of Bellini’s remaining loyalists. For four years, they thought Julian died with it, or that I had recovered it. But last week, Bellini was released from federal detention on a technicality.”
The car slowed, turning smoothly onto the potholed asphalt of our street in Brooklyn.
“Bellini knows the key exists,” Dominic murmured, his gaze dropping to the floor between us. “And he knows Julian had one person on this earth he loved enough to trust with his life.”
My breath seized. “I don't have anything. I never had anything! Julian’s belongings were returned to me in a cardboard box from the precinct! A watch with a cracked face, his wedding ring, twenty-four dollars, and an empty wallet!”
The car came to a halt outside my dilapidated brownstone. Through the rain-slicked glass, the street looked desolate, the orange glow of the sodium streetlamps painting the puddles like pools of rust.
Dominic leaned back, his eyes darkening.
May you like
“You may not know you have it, Elena,” he said softly. “But Bellini doesn't believe in coincidences. And tomorrow morning, his people will be outside your hospital.”
***
