Chapter 1 - The Six Red Lights
My name is Marina Collins. I was twenty-six years old, three weeks into a housekeeping job, and about to find out whether destroying my employer's fifty-thousand-dollar bed was a firing offense or a fatal mistake.
I needed the money. Desperately.
That was how sensible people occasionally found themselves working for dangerous men.
Dante Montenegro owned shipping companies, hotels, private clubs, and enough of New York's darker business that people lowered their voices when discussing the rest. He was forty-two, six-foot-five, black-haired, and built like a man who had never needed to move out of anyone's way.
His gray eyes missed very little.
Lately, they looked as though seeing anything hurt.
The other staff called him Boss. I called him Mr. Montenegro and tried to remain too useful to notice.
On Tuesday morning, I was changing the sheets in his private suite when I heard a vibration.
At first, I blamed the air-conditioning.
Then I pressed my palm to the black leather headboard.
The faint mechanical buzzing traveled through the frame.
My father had restored furniture for most of his life. I had spent school vacations handing him tools and learning to recognize things that didn't belong inside wood.
This didn't belong.
I checked the lamp. The nearby outlet. The wall behind the bed.
Then I found a narrow seam under the decorative panel. The stitching was newer than the leather around it.
Somebody had opened the headboard before.
I should have called my supervisor.
Instead, I picked up the letter opener from the bedside desk and climbed onto the mattress.
I had barely worked its tip beneath the seam when the door flew open.
“Get off my bed! What the hell are you doing?”
Dante stood in the doorway with two guards behind him.
One was Bruno, his head of security.
I froze with one knee planted in the middle of the mattress.
“Mr. Montenegro, there's something hidden inside your headboard.”
His gaze moved to the damaged leather.
“You're destroying my furniture.”
“Something is vibrating inside it.”
Bruno stepped forward.
“Get down. Now.”
I looked at the seam.
The buzzing had stopped.
Of course it had.
“Please,” I said. “Let me show you.”
Dante raised a hand, stopping Bruno.
Then he looked at his watch.
“You have thirty seconds to explain yourself.”
“Then you'd better watch closely.”
The sentence escaped before fear could edit it.
I pulled.
Leather tore. A strip of dark wood appeared. Behind it, something blinked red.
I reached into the gap and brought out a small black unit.
Dante's expression changed.
“What is that?”
“I don't know.”
Another light flickered inside the headboard.
Then another.
I pulled a second section loose.
By the time I stopped, six little devices lay across the torn upholstery and my open hand.
Six red lights.
Bruno stared at them.
Dante approached the bed slowly.
“Four months,” he said.
“Sir?”
“I haven't slept properly in four months.”
I knew about the specialists visiting the house. The appointments rearranged. The coffee that appeared on trays at hours when ordinary people were dreaming.
I hadn't known it had lasted that long.
“Every doctor keeps telling me stress is part of it.”
He looked at the opening in his bed.
“Maybe they weren't told everything happening in this room,” I said.
Bruno shook his head.
“Nobody outside your approved circle has been in here.”
“Then someone inside this house did this.”
Dante turned toward him.
“Who has access to my bedroom?”
Bruno's hand moved toward the inside of his jacket.
At that exact moment, the unit in my palm began vibrating.
Its red light flashed faster.
The other five answered.
Dante's voice cut through the room.
“Bruno. Show me your hand.”
The guard beside Bruno shifted his stance.
I stopped breathing.
Slowly, Bruno drew out a phone.
“It's my security handset.”
“Put it on the table.”
He did.
The six devices continued trembling against the torn leather, making a small, ugly sound.
Dante looked at the phone, then at Bruno's face.
“What were you going to do?”
“Check the house alerts. I got one when they started.”
“You have an alert for this?”
Bruno's expression changed as the meaning of the question reached him.
“I have alerts for equipment faults in the private wing. I thought it was part of the bed controls.”
I set down the device carefully.
It was easier to think once I wasn't holding the noise.
“Someone inside this house wants you broken,” I whispered.
Dante looked at me.
For a moment, I regretted saying it.
Not because I thought it was wrong.
Because I had never seen a powerful man look so tired of being afraid.
“Nobody touches anything else,” he said. “Step away from the bed.”
This time, I obeyed.
He called for an independent technical examiner and told the second guard to bring our head housekeeper. Bruno remained where he was.
“Am I under suspicion?” Bruno asked.
“Everyone with access is under a question,” Dante replied. “That includes me until we understand what this is.”
The answer surprised me.
So did the next thing he said.
“Marina. Did you cut yourself?”
I looked at my hands. A shallow line marked one thumb.
“It's nothing.”
“That wasn't the question.”
Mrs. Vera Bell arrived with a first-aid kit and the expression of a woman who had spent thirty years being asked to make impossible mornings orderly.
She sat me in a chair.
Dante didn't take his eyes off the headboard.
The vibration stopped.
Bruno's handset lit up again.
He looked at Dante before touching it.
Dante nodded.
The guard read the notification.
Then he looked up very slowly.
“Boss.”
May you like
“What?”
“The system labels that command as yours.”
