Chapter 4
Carlo had been Anthony’s closest adviser. When he died, he left Luca a name and left Damian the quiet comfort that one more witness to the boathouse night had gone naturally.
Damian stood at the window with the photograph in his fist. He could not decide whether Luca was his most trusted ally or the son of the man who had helped erase his father.
He called Marco DeLuca, the attorney who had worked for him long enough to recognize when a question required silence. Damian sent photographs of the watch, the graves, the serial number, and Carlo’s face.
“Find everything Carlo did the week my father died. Don’t touch a Romano server.”
Marco was quiet for a moment. “You think someone inside will see the search.”
“I know they will.”
At seven, the west clock struck through the house, seven deep notes. Damian stood at the dark window and watched the canal until a narrow motorboat slid by with no lights and no markings. Its driver wore a hooded raincoat and never looked toward the house. It slowed at the old stone dock, waited thirty seconds, and moved on.
He left through the service passage Anthony had shown him as a boy and took an unregistered fishing boat from under the maintenance pier. He carried one pistol, his father’s watch, and a tracker only Marco could see. Mia stayed with Mrs. Bell and six guards he had chosen himself.
For the first time, Luca had no idea where he was going.
—
Rain hammered Blackstone Lake until visibility dropped below fifty yards. The nameless boat led him into a channel walled by forest, then vanished around a rocky bend. When Damian rounded it, the boat sat empty beside a rotting dock. A lantern burned at the door of an abandoned summer lodge.
The Romano family had owned it once. Anthony had sold it the year before his death, or so the records said.
The front door stood open.
Claire Bennett sat tied to a chair in the middle of the room. Her lip was split and one cheek was purple. When she saw him, relief crossed her face for half a second and terror replaced it.
“Damian, get *down*—”
A shot blew apart the lamp behind him. He dropped, rolled behind the stone fireplace, and fired at the dark hallway without aiming to kill. Boots pounded upstairs.
“Two men,” Claire shouted. “Maybe three!”
He crawled to her between shots and cut the rope with his knife. “Where’s Robert?”
“They took him. He pulled me out of the car and then they took him.”
“Who?”
Her eyes burned. “The people who’ve been hiding behind your family’s name for twenty-two years.”
Sirens rose in the distance. The shooters fled through the back. Marco had sent state police the moment the tracker moved, so whoever built the trap had not planned on outsiders.
Claire refused an ambulance. She would go nowhere, she said, unless he promised that no one from Romano security would come near her.
—
They left in Marco’s car, not Damian’s. Claire sat wrapped in a blanket with her gaze on the watch in his hand.
“You opened it.”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll start at the beginning.”
She had not come to his laundry because she needed a job. She was an investigative accountant. For four years she had traced shell companies created before Anthony Romano died, and every thread led back to the same name.
Her mother, Evelyn Bennett, had worked nights as a nurse at the private clinic where Anthony’s body was supposedly examined. Before Evelyn died six years ago, she confessed something to Claire. Anthony had never arrived at the clinic. The body delivered under his name was already sealed in a transport bag.
“Carlo Marino ordered her to sign the paperwork without opening it.” Claire’s voice shook. “She refused, so another nurse forged her signature.”
Evelyn had kept copies of the original intake log. The height and blood type didn’t match Anthony’s. She hid them for years because Carlo warned her that Damian Romano would die if anyone reopened the question.
Damian said it slowly. “He used me to keep her quiet.”
Claire nodded.
She had followed the log to Robert Hale, whose name was on a maintenance invoice for the boathouse that same night. Three months ago, he had finally told her the truth.
“He helped your father and your uncle leave the property by water.”
The watch bit into Damian’s palm. “They left alive.”
“Yes.”
“Both of them.”
“Yes.”
Twenty-two years of grief rearranged themselves into something sharp enough to hurt. Damian looked out at the rain on the glass so Claire wouldn’t see his face.
“Where did they go?”
“Sebastian went north.”
“And my father?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Robert had said Anthony was wounded and barely conscious. Sebastian took him on a second boat while Robert stayed to stage the scene. Anthony had not known which police could be trusted. He had feared that if his enemies learned he lived, they would use his seventeen-year-old son to draw him out.
So the brothers vanished. It was meant to be temporary. Then Sebastian himself disappeared three weeks later.
“Until three months ago,” Claire said. “Sebastian turned up at Robert’s cottage. He’s sick. Cancer, months to live.”
Damian turned.
“He says he’s spent twenty-two years looking for your father while hiding from the same people who set up the boathouse.”
“Who?”
May you like
Claire looked at Anthony’s watch. “He thinks Carlo Marino.”
The car hissed through the rain. Damian thought of a heavy hand on his father’s shoulder, and of Luca standing in his garden twelve hours ago asking *how the hell did she get in here*.
