Chapter 5
The next day passed slowly.
The air was thick with impending rain and something else Arya could not name. Luca was in the security room all morning, checking monitors, drinking coffee he did not taste. The two guards moved through the halls with the particular alertness of men who did not like the weather.
Around four in the afternoon, a delivery van pulled up to the front gate.
Arya was in the kitchen when she heard Luca’s radio crackle. She went to the window.
“No,” Luca said into the radio. “Rocco, check the gate. Who is that?”
Arya watched the burly guard walk toward the intercom. She watched him talk for a moment. And then she watched him punch in the code to open the massive iron gates.
“What is he doing?” Luca slammed his coffee cup down. “Rocco, stand down. Do not open the gate.”
Rocco ignored the radio.
The van rolled through.
“Get to the panic room in the basement. Now.”
Luca grabbed Arya’s arm and pulled her toward the stairs.
They never made it.
The front door exploded inward before they reached the hallway.
Rocco stood in the frame holding a shotgun. Behind him were four men in ski masks.
“Rocco, what are you doing?” Luca barked, putting himself between the men and Arya. He drew his weapon. “Sorry, Luca,” Rocco said, his face impassive. “Rossi pays better. And he doesn’t shoot his own people for small mistakes.”
“You traitorous piece of—”
Rocco fired.
The shotgun blast caught Luca square in the chest. He flew backward and crashed into the wall and slid down it, leaving a smear of bright red.
Arya screamed — a raw sound, pulled out of her, not a word.
Two of the masked men grabbed her. She fought. She kicked and bit and tasted leather gloves and sweat.
“Easy, princess,” one of them grunted. “Mr. Rossi wants you in one piece. Don’t make us damage the merchandise.”
Rocco walked over to Luca’s body and spat on it. Then he looked at Arya.
“Tell Dante he should pay more attention to his own house,” he said, “instead of chasing ghosts.”
They dragged her out into the rain and threw her into the back of the van and zip-tied her wrists.
As the van sped away, Arya stared back at the closed gate of the safe house, and her mind replayed Luca falling, over and over, and she understood with a sickening clarity that the safety Dante had promised her was an illusion.
She was alone.
And she was headed into the heart of the dark.
—
Vinnie Rossi’s base of operations was a nightmare made of concrete and steel.
It was a defunct meatpacking plant deep in the desolate industrial edge of the meatpacking district, a place the city’s gentrification had not yet reached, and the air inside was freezing and heavy with the metallic tang of old blood, bleach, and something sweet and rotten underneath.
Arya was shoved onto a rusted metal chair in the center of the kill floor.
Her wrists were zip-tied behind the back of the chair, so tightly that her hands had already begun to go numb. Above her, heavy iron hooks hung from motorized chains on the ceiling, swaying slightly in the draft.
She shivered. Not just from the cold.
Men with guns stood at the perimeter in ski masks, watching her from the darkness of the office catwalk with predatory indifference.
Then footsteps — slow, deliberate, heavy — and Vinnie Rossi came down the metal stairs into the harsh halogen light.
He was the antithesis of Dante. Where Dante was polished granite and ice, Vinnie was grease and heat. Shorter, with a paunch straining against a cheap silk shirt, smelling of stale cigar smoke and expensive, tacky cologne. His eyes were like polished black stones — no warmth, no mercy.
“So,” he said, and the sound of his voice clanged through the empty space. “The lost princess returns to the mud.”
Arya lifted her chin. Her heart was hammering, but she refused to cower. She had spent three days watching Dante Moretti command rooms with silence. She tried to channel a fraction of that steel.
“My name,” she said, her voice trembling only slightly, “is Arya Brooks.”
Vinnie laughed — a wet, wheezing sound that turned into a cough. He circled her chair, and his fingers trailed across her shoulders, and she flinched at the touch.
“Brooks,” he mocked. “A name for nobodies. A name for people who scrub floors.” He stopped in front of her and leaned down until his face was inches from hers, and his breath was foul. “You are somebody, sweetheart. You are the key to the kingdom. You are the walking, breathing vault of Lorenzo Valentinetti.”
“Where is the ledger, Arya?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Tears stung her eyes. “Dante told me about it, but I’ve never seen it. I was five years old when my father died.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
His mood swung instantly from mocking to violent, and he backhanded her across the face. The blow exploded in a burst of white light behind her eyes. Her head snapped sideways. She tasted copper where her tooth had cut her lip.
“Lorenzo wouldn’t leave his legacy unguarded,” Vinnie hissed, grabbing her chin and forcing her to look at him. “He left it with you. What did he give you? A key? A sequence of numbers? A nursery rhyme?”
“Nothing,” Arya cried. “Please. I don’t know.”
Vinnie’s eyes dropped to her hand.
He grabbed her left hand and twisted her wrist painfully to look at the ring. The wolf crest seemed to mock him — sealed, seamless, fused.
“This,” he muttered, and his eyes glazed with obsession. “It’s always about the ring with you people. The old king’s seal.” He yanked at it. It would not budge. “Is the code inside it? Etched on the band?”
“It’s stuck,” Arya gasped.
“Stuck.”
Vinnie smiled, and it was a terrifying expression. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a switchblade. With a flick of his wrist, the blade snapped open and glinted under the industrial lights.
“There are ways to solve stuck, princess. If the ring won’t come off the finger—” he laid the blade against the skin just above her knuckle— “we take the finger off the hand.”
Arya stared at the blade. Horror seized her chest.
“Dante will kill you for this,” she said. “He will burn this whole city to find me.”
May you like
Vinnie laughed, but there was a nervous edge in it now.
“Dante is busy cleaning up a mess in Queens that I created. I sent him on a wild goose chase.” He leaned in. “By the time the great Dante Moretti realizes his little bird has flown the coop, I’ll have the ledger, and you’ll be fish food at the bottom of the Hudson.”
