Chapter 7 - THE LONG WALK DOWN THE EAST WING
Vincent turned away from the bank of monitors.
He did not walk with his customary, unhurried corporate swagger; every step across the concrete floor of the bunker felt heavy, weighted by forty pounds of invisible lead dragging at his boots. He hit the electronic release for the heavy steel security door. The hydraulic deadbolts retracted with a dull, pneumatic hiss, and the thick portal swung outward into the subterranean tunnel connecting the bunker to the main residence.
The basement corridor was cold, smelling of aged limestone, wine cellars, and the damp earth of the North Shore. Vincent climbed the narrow service stairs two at a time, his polished Oxford dress shoes clicking softly against the cast-iron risers. His chest burned with an acute, suffocating pressure, his lungs struggling to pull in enough oxygen as the reality of what had just happened pulsed through his veins.
He spoke.
The two words echoed through his mind in rhythm with his heartbeat. He spoke. Fourteen months. Four hundred days. He spoke.
Vincent pushed through the concealed service door behind the library wainscoting and emerged onto the ground floor of the main mansion.
The house was vast, empty, and silent. Two armed security guards dressed in tailored charcoal suits stood at rigid attention near the grand marble staircase in the foyer. When they saw their employer emerge—his black three-piece suit unbuttoned, his tie crooked, his dark wavy hair in disarray, and his eyes bloodshot with raw, wet emotion—both men visibly stiffened, their hands drifting instinctively toward their sidearms, assuming a security breach had occurred.
"Sir?" the senior guard barked, stepping forward. "Is there a threat?"
"Stand down," Vincent rasped, his voice rough as sandpaper, not even glancing at them as he brushed past the limestone pillars. "Clear the floor. Nobody comes up to the second wing. Nobody."
The guards exchanged a startled, uneasy glance, but Vincent was already taking the grand curved staircase three treads at a time.
He reached the second-floor gallery. The east corridor stretched eighty feet before him, lined with fluted molding painted in soft dove-gray, crowned with crystal sconces that cast pools of warm, buttery amber across the polished white oak floor. At the far end of the hallway stood the double mahogany doors of Room Seven—Matteo’s suite.
Vincent slowed his pace.
His boots made no sound against the thick wool runner that stretched down the center of the hall. With every step he took toward that door, the towering, ruthless titan who had conquered Manhattan’s financial elite felt himself shrinking, stripping away layers of armor, until he felt like nothing more than an exhausted, terrified boy walking toward a judgment he knew he deserved.
He remembered the morning of the bombing.
He remembered Matteo begging him to come to the gallery opening—begging him to skip the conference call with the Hong Kong maritime syndicate so they could look at the renaissance ship models together. Vincent had tousled his son's hair, handed him a fifty-dollar bill for the gift shop, and said, "Daddy has business, Matteo. Big boys let their fathers work."
Two hours later, Vincent had been standing in the smoking, blood-splattered ruins of the gallery floor, digging through pulverized concrete with his bare, bleeding hands, screaming his wife’s name into the dust while the sirens waked the city.
He had saved the boy's body. But he had left Matteo’s soul buried beneath that limestone.
Vincent stopped outside the double doors of Room Seven.
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The door on the right was cracked open by half an inch—the standard security protocol Clara had established so she could hear the hall staff.
Vincent did not push it open. He stood in the warm amber shadow of the corridor, his breath catching in his throat, looking through the narrow vertical slit into the nursery.
