Chapter 4
He took the main staircase two steps at a time, in shirtsleeves, his shoes silent on the runner.
At the far end of the servants’ corridor, Bruno stood rigid before the last wall: a tall panel of dark walnut inlaid with climbing vines. It had been there as long as the house had had corridors. It was decoration. It led nowhere.
The dog was growling at it. His claws had scraped one long, clean streak across the carved leaves.
Sophie caught up, breathless, and pressed her small palm flat against the wood.
“There’s no door here, Bruno.”
A footstep behind her. She turned.
Dante stood at the end of the corridor in an open collar and socks, the Beretta held low along his thigh. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at his dog. Then at the wall.
He had lived in this house thirty-two years. He had never once stopped in this corridor.
He crouched. His eyes ran along the vines, along the brass pins at each joint, down to the baseboard. There, one pin sat a quarter inch lower than its neighbors, where the pattern of leaves broke.
He pressed it with his thumb.
A click, small as a watch hand reaching the hour. A vertical seam opened in the wall, barely an inch, and from it poured a breath of cold air smelling of old brick and iron and something older than either.
Sophie took a step back. Bruno leaned forward, every muscle drawn.
“Stay here,” Dante said, low, the way he’d speak to one of his own men.
Sophie nodded once. She sat cross-legged on the runner, back against the opposite wall, the star pillow in her lap.
Bruno did not follow Dante into the wall. He turned and set his heavy shoulder between the girl and the corridor behind her.
He had chosen.
Dante lit his phone’s small white light and stepped through.
The passage was narrow enough that two men could not have walked it shoulder to shoulder. Red brick, laid by a mason born before either of Dante’s grandfathers. The air smelled of damp iron and, faintly, of sweetness: the way soil under old roses smells when it’s been turned recently.
Six steps in, he crouched. Footprints. Fresh.
He counted the outlines in the thin dust. Four different sizes. One heavy, one light, two between.
Not one man passing through. A network. People who knew the way.
Something under his ribs went very still. He had never known this tunnel existed. But he remembered the drawings, rolled in a leather tube in his father’s study beside the deeds to the wine cellar. The original plans, 1929, when the first Moretti to own this land built a service passage from the servants’ corridor under the rose garden and out past the wall to a boathouse on the Sound.
Canadian whiskey had come in this way for eleven years.
His father had sealed it personally in 1996, with men Dante knew by name.
Someone had opened it again.
Behind him, Bruno gave a low whine. Not fear. A reminder.
Dante backed out, felt along the inside edge until his fingers found the small iron bolt his father’s men had left decades ago, and slid it home. The seam closed with the same watchmaker’s click.
Sophie was still on the runner, both arms around the pillow, eyes enormous.
Dante bent and lifted her.
She weighed almost nothing, a bag of feathers and warm cotton. He was surprised, genuinely, that his arms knew what to do. That she settled against his shoulder as if she had done it before.
Bruno padded beside them, close to his hip, close to her socks.
He carried her up the back stair to the large drawing room, where French windows looked onto the black lawn. He set her on a silk sofa and put a cashmere throw around her shoulders. Then he crossed to the credenza and lifted the house phone. Not the radio. Radios had ears.
He dialed Tommy Ricci’s cottage. Tommy answered on the second ring, already awake.
“My study. Ten minutes. Come the back way. Tell no one.”
When he turned back, Sophie was watching him over the edge of the throw. Her feet in their mismatched socks did not reach the floor.
“Mr. Dante,” she said. “Was there a monster in the wall?”
He sat on the low table so their eyes were level.
“No, sweetheart. Something worse.”
He chose the next words carefully. He wanted to get them right.
“A grown-up who lies.”
She was quiet. Her brow drew together. Her fingers picked at a loose point of the star.
“I know a grown-up who lies,” she said. “I saw him.”
Dante did not move. He kept his voice exactly where it had been.
“When?”
Her eyes went soft and unfocused, looking at an afternoon six days gone.
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“When Bruno was sleeping in the sun. I was hiding.”
He set the phone down very slowly between them. Then he lowered himself to one knee on the carpet, until he was the one looking up.
