Chapter 1 - The Silver Frame Behind the Leather Books
The question hung in the air like smoke after a shot. The little girl stood on tiptoe beside my mahogany desk, her small finger extended toward the sliver of space behind the third volume of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall. Behind that heavy spine sat a narrow silver frame I had tucked away before the first limousine pulled onto the gravel drive. I had placed it there so my own reflection in the window wouldn’t taunt me every time the chandelier downstairs shook with laughter.
Yet the angle of the study lamp caught the silver rim just right. In the frame was a portrait of a woman in an emerald silk scarf, her cheek resting against the shoulder of a young man with my own stubborn jawline and clear, unforgiving eyes. Julian. My younger brother. The only person who had ever looked at the Valenti empire and called it what it truly was: a cage made of gold wire and bad promises.
“That’s nobody you need to know about,” I said, setting the plate with the crooked cake onto a stack of unopened envelopes. My voice carried the flat, low timber that made aldermen check their pocket watches and back toward the door.
Mia did not flinch. Children who grow up in big houses learn early that quiet men are either dangerous or sad; she seemed to have decided I was merely pathetic. She tilted her head, her shoe strap flapping against the hardwood floor. “He has ears like mine. Sticky out.”
A dry sound caught in my throat. It wasn't a chuckle; it was too rusty for that. Julian’s ears had been the joke of our grammar school yard on 24th Street before our family traded cold apartments for five-acre tracts in Lake Forest. “His ears were fine,” I corrected her, moving around the desk to block her view. “And you shouldn’t be upstairs. There are guards on the landing who don’t look where they step.”
“Dante is outside,” she said simply, naming my head of personal security—a man who had survived three federal grand juries and two street ambushes without ever blinking. “He gave me a grape. He said if I dropped the plate, he would have to eat the floor cake, and his stomach hurts from the prawns.”
I closed my eyes for three seconds, making a mental note to dock Dante’s Christmas bonus before remembering that Dante was the only person alive who knew why the portrait was still in this room. Eight years ago tonight, Julian had walked out of this very study into a sleet storm after telling me he would rather teach high school civics in Iowa than sign another shipping manifest for Valenti Freight. Two hours later, his sedan had been pulled out of the Calumet River with three holes in the driver-side door that the Cook County coroner had ruled an unfortunate collision with bridge rebar.
I had spent eight years buying judges, burying rivals, and turning the Valenti name into a shield so thick no bullet could pierce it. But I had never looked into that silver frame on my birthday without tasting salt and cheap gun oil.
“Come here,” I told the girl.
She stepped forward without hesitation. Her little fingers reached out and touched the cuff of my bespoke dress shirt, leaving a smear of pink powdered sugar against the French linen. I didn't pull away. In the marble hallway below, the brass section of the orchestra struck up a loud, clumsy rendition of a jazz standard, and a chorus of drunken cheers rose toward the painted ceiling.
“My mommy is crying in the laundry room,” Mia whispered, leaning close as if we were co-conspirators in a schoolyard feud. “Because the lady with the red feather said she spilled soup on the carpet. But it was the lady’s dog that did it. The dog with no tail.”
The lady with the red feather was Evelyn Vance, the widow of our former chief financial officer, who currently held twelve percent of my commercial trucking shares and believed her pedigree entitled her to speak to service staff like stray cattle.
“Your mother didn’t spill it?” I asked.
“No,” Mia said firmly. “Claire is very careful with soup. She makes me eat over the sink so the noodles don't jump.”
May you like
I picked up the little plastic fork resting on the edge of the paper plate. The cake was dense, yellow, and smelled strongly of almond extract. I took a single bite. It was far too sweet, unevenly baked, and the best thing I had tasted since Julian’s twenty-fifth dinner at the corner diner in Cicero.
“All right,” I said, setting the fork down and smoothing my tie. “Let’s go see about your mother’s noodles.”
