Chapter 3 - The Son His Brother Left Behind
Vincent wanted to call everyone.
Old allies.
Judges who had attended his parties.
Men who owed him favors they would never put into words.
Rosa placed the telephone on the table but kept her hand over it.
“Will any of those people help her?”
She nodded toward Elena.
“Or will they help you make this disappear?”
Vincent stared at the phone.
For most of his life, those had seemed like the same thing.
Now he understood the difference.
Elena named an attorney who had once helped a neighbor in a workplace retaliation case.
Miriam Hale.
“She represented a witness against one of your companies,” Elena said.
Vincent remembered her.
He also remembered telling Rinaldi to make her regret it.
His stomach turned.
“She won’t speak to me.”
“Good,” Rosa said. “She might speak to us.”
Miriam arrived after midnight.
She carried no visible fear and a bag large enough to suggest she expected a long night.
She listened to Elena first.
Then she looked at Vincent.
“I’m not going to help you settle a family disagreement.”
“Neither am I,” he said.
Miriam studied him.
“Are you willing to answer questions about your own conduct?”
He hesitated.
Elena saw it.
Of course she did.
“If this becomes another bargain,” she said, “I’m leaving.”
Vincent looked toward the photograph of her son.
“Yes,” he told Miriam. “I’m willing.”
The lawyer’s expression did not soften.
“Then we can begin.”
She arranged for Elena to give a recorded account of what had happened, documented the papers, and contacted an investigator she trusted outside the network Vincent had cultivated for decades.
Nobody promised safety without conditions.
Nobody promised immunity.
That honesty was strangely reassuring.
Just before two, Vincent’s phone vibrated inside the coat he had removed.
He had switched it back on long enough to retrieve one number.
Now Marcus was calling.
Miriam nodded toward the screen.
“You decide whether to answer. Don’t make promises.”
Vincent put the call on speaker.
“Uncle Vin?”
The old nickname struck harder than the word uncle should have.
Marcus sounded young.
Terribly young.
“Where are you?”
Vincent kept his voice level.
“You tell me.”
A pause.
“What happened at the house wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Which part?”
“Please.”
“Your men searching my bedroom? My wife discussing my body? Elena being marked for death?”
Marcus breathed sharply.
“I didn’t know she was there.”
Elena looked away.
Vincent could hear the cowardice in his nephew’s answer.
He could also hear fear.
“Why?” Vincent asked.
For a long moment, Marcus said nothing.
Then the words came out in a rush.
“Because you killed my father.”
The room went still.
Anthony Torino had been Vincent’s younger brother.
He had died twenty-one years earlier on a wet highway outside the city.
A crash.
That was what the police had called it.
Vincent had accepted the report because Anthony had been angry, drinking, and threatening to leave the family business.
Those facts had made the explanation convenient.
“Who told you that?”
“Rinaldi showed me the letter.”
“What letter?”
“Dad wrote it before he died. He said you’d never let him leave.”
Vincent shut his eyes.
That part sounded like him.
Not a confession.
Something uglier in its own way.
A sentence he might have spoken and forgotten because he had never been the person forced to live beneath it.
“I threatened him,” Vincent said.
Marcus went silent.
“I told him he couldn’t walk away with company money. I told him there would be consequences.”
Elena watched him carefully.
“But I did not order his death.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“You shouldn’t believe me because I’m your uncle. Give the letter to someone who can examine it.”
“Rinaldi has it.”
“Then send the copy he gave you.”
Footsteps sounded faintly through Marcus’s phone.
His voice dropped.
“I have to go.”
“Marcus.”
“What?”
“Don’t go anywhere with Aldo.”
The call ended.
A minute later, a photograph arrived.
A letter on Anthony’s stationery.
Vincent recognized his brother’s handwriting.
He also recognized the address printed at the top.
A company office on Westlake Avenue.
Miriam leaned forward as Vincent went pale.
“What is it?”
“That office opened three years after Anthony died.”
Elena read the page again.
A dead man’s warning.
Written on stationery from the future.
For the first time that night, Marcus had handed them something the people behind him had not meant to share.
Then another message appeared.
Not from Marcus.
From Claudia.
You always did mistake obedience for love.
Beneath it was a photograph of a young woman outside a café.
Vincent’s daughter, Sophie.
May you like
And four words.
Bring back what’s ours.
