Chapter 6 - The Dead Man's Ledger
Dante did not draw his weapon upward. He lowered his tall, muscular frame smoothly, his bare knees touching the cold river slate, bringing himself down until his slate-gray eyes were level with Sophie’s hazel gaze.
Beside him, Bruno sat on his haunches, his scarred black head resting against Dante’s shoulder, a silent guardian waiting for the word to kill.
Dante looked at the child. In the dim, amber light of the corridor sconces, his face was carved from pure stone, but his voice, when he spoke to her, held an unnatural, gentle cadence that shielded her from the horror of the open grave before them.
"Sophie," Dante asked softly. "Look at me, little bird."
Sophie turned her head from the tunnel, meeting his gaze without flinching. She squeezed her gold star pillow tighter against her chest.
"Did the man talk to you through the glass?" Dante asked.
"Yes," she whispered, nodding once.
"What did he say?"
The silence that descended upon the servants' corridor was heavier than the three stories of stone above their heads. The only sound was the distant drumming of the thunderstorm outside and the rapid, shallow breathing of Elena standing behind them.
Sophie’s innocent hazel eyes looked deep into Dante’s.
"He said Daddy wasn’t supposed to die," Sophie whispered.
Dante froze.
Every nerve ending along Dante Moretti’s spine detonated with white-hot, paralyzed shock. His hands, which had remained as steady as steel vices through a hundred firefights, locked into absolute stillness. The breath seized in his throat, burning like dry ice.
Sophie’s father was Marco Reyes.
Three years ago, Marco had been Dante’s most trusted underboss, his childhood brother, his right hand during the brutal territorial transition that had secured the Moretti family’s absolute dominion over the Great Lakes ports. And three years ago, on a rain-slicked dock in Green Bay, Marco Reyes’s car had exploded into an inferno of shrapnel and aviation fuel.
Dante had pulled the burning metal off Marco’s charred frame with his own bare hands. He had buried his brother in the family crypt; he had promised on the crucifix around his neck that he would house, protect, and provide for Elena and the unborn child Marco had left behind. For thirty-six months, the official verdict of the five syndicates had been settled: the bombing had been the work of the Marcone family out of Chicago—a debt Dante had repaid by wiping out seven Marcone warehouses and executing their underboss in an open cornfield.
Before Dante’s mind could even begin to process the impossibility of the words, Sophie tilted her head, her chestnut curls brushing against the blue bow, and added a final, quiet sentence:
"And you know who killed him."
Dante Moretti’s face drained of every drop of color.
The skin across his sharp cheekbones turned the color of wet chalk. His lips parted, but no sound emerged—only a ragged, silent hitch of his diaphragm that rattled against his ribs.
Elena dropped to her knees behind them, her hand flying to her mouth, stifling a high, keening wail of pure terror. "Marco... oh God, Marco..."
Dante slowly lifted his head.
His gray eyes did not look at Elena. They did not look at the child.
He turned his gaze slowly toward the open, yawning mouth of the dark brick tunnel.
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Whoever was walking those bricks was not a scout from Chicago. Whoever had been tapping on that window had been there the night the fire took Marco Reyes.
And they were inside his house.
