Chapter 1 - The Duck Pajamas
Word Count: ~800 words
At 11:40 on a Thursday night in October, Victor Castellano was alone in the one room at Harrow Point nobody entered without knocking twice.
Rain struck the heavy leaded windows hard enough to sound like thrown gravel.
The stone fireplace had gone cold hours ago. A half-finished cup of black coffee sat beside his right hand, completely untouched since Marcus Dell had called from the estate security office to tell him the back-gate camera had failed again.
Victor was looking at a high-stakes shipping ledger when the double mahogany doors flew open with a bang.
No knock. No guard. No permission.
A three-year-old girl in a thin pajama shirt covered with faded yellow ducks ran straight across the Persian rug barefoot. Her blonde curls were soaked with rainwater. A gray stuffed rabbit with one ear clumsily sewn on in red thread was crushed tight against her small chest.
Her face was paper white, contrast against her tear-stained red cheeks. She stopped right in front of Victor’s massive oak desk, her tiny body shaking in small, broken hiccups.
“A man is pushing Mama into a black car outside,” the maid’s toddler shouted.
Victor was on his feet before the child even finished the sentence. The chair screeched violently backward.
“Where?” his voice was low, sharp, and razor-focused.
“By the back gate.”
He came around the desk in two large strides, kneeling on one knee. Little Poppy Bell reached out and grabbed his tailored sleeve with a frantic grip.
“He put his hand on her mouth,” she whimpered, tears pouring down her cheeks. “Mama dropped her shoes.”
Victor’s blood turned instantly to ice. In his forty-two years on this earth, running the dark underbelly of Baltimore’s shipping docks, fear was an emotion he had long eradicated. But hearing that Hannah Bell—the quiet, fiercely devoted maid who had brought light back into his lonely estate after years of tragedy—was dragged into the dark sent a wave of raw adrenaline through his veins.
“Marcus,” Victor said, pulling his cell phone out without breaking eye contact with the terrified girl.
“Boss?” Marcus’s voice snapped through the speaker.
“Back gate. Right now. Red alert.”
He scooped Poppy up with one arm, shielding her wet head against his chest, and crossed the long study in seconds. The little girl clung to his neck for dear life, her stuffed rabbit trapped between them.
“Teddy!” Victor barked as a young security guard appeared at the top of the main staircase, reaching for his hip holster.
Victor transferred Poppy into the guard's arms carefully. “Do not let her out of your sight. Lock down the third-floor nursery.”
“But Mama—” Poppy sobbed, reaching back out to Victor.
Victor stopped. He extended a broad, scarred hand and gently touched the child’s wet, cold cheek. “I’m going to get her.”
“You promise?” she whispered, hiccuping.
Promises were lethal things in Victor Castellano’s dangerous world. He had spent twelve long years refusing to make a single pledge he could not guarantee with blood and iron. Tonight, staring into the innocent eyes of Hannah’s daughter, he answered without a single second of hesitation.
“I promise.”
Then he ran.
Men in Baltimore’s underworld had watched Victor Castellano walk into rooms for twenty years and had never seen the mob boss hurry. He was a man of cold, deliberate calculation. But tonight, he took the sweeping marble stairs three at a time. He crossed the front entrance hall, entirely ignoring the heavy umbrella thrust toward him by a bewildered house butler.
Rain hit him like a physical blow the moment he stepped into the stormy night air.
The high iron back gate stood wide open. Not broken by force—unlocked and pushed open. A fresh set of tire tracks cut deeply through the wet gravel before turning wildly onto the unlit private road.
The security camera mounted above the gate hung limp and dark.
Marcus appeared from the bushes with a heavy tactical flashlight, its beam slicing through the downpour. “Gate camera dropped at eleven thirty-one.”
“How long?” Victor demanded, his suit soaked through in seconds.
“Still down. Feed was manually cut from inside the circuit box.”
Victor’s dark gaze swept across the flattened grass. Something vibrated softly near the edge of the boxwood hedge. He bent down, brushing aside wet leaves.
It was a phone. Hannah Bell’s phone. Face down in the thick mud, screen badly cracked. On the display, his own missed call from ten minutes ago glowed softly before going dark.
Marcus looked toward the empty garage bay nearby, his flashlight flickering. “Gregory’s Mercedes is gone.”
Victor slowly straightened up, the cold rain streaming down his face. “What did you say?”
“Gregory left at nine forty,” Marcus muttered, reading off a handheld radio tablet. “No departure was logged in the central ledger.”
For one terrifying second, the roar of the rain seemed to vanish entirely from Victor’s ears.
Gregory Vance. Fourteen years as the estate manager. Keeper of schedules. Keeper of master keys. The man who knew every secret passage, every security override, and every quiet hour Victor kept when he couldn't sleep. The man who had stood stoically beside Victor at the rainy graves of his wife Elena and son Leo twelve Novembers ago.
The man Victor had trusted enough to stop watching.
Marcus’s voice hardened as his phone buzzed with an urgent security alert. “Victor... look at this. I just checked the vault safe access logs from this morning.”
Victor stared at his head of security. “The missing Delacroix shipping ledgers were never taken by Hannah, were they?”
“No,” Marcus said grimly. “The master safe was opened at six-oh-four this morning using a master clearance code. Yours... or Gregory’s.”
Victor felt the earth shift violently beneath his feet. Four hours earlier, Gregory had placed a tablet in Victor’s hands showing grainy, cropped footage of Hannah leaving his private office, framed alongside forged documents showing heavy hospital debt for her daughter. Gregory had painted her as a desperate widow who stole state secrets to sell to the rival Moretti crime family.
It was a story arranged so neatly that Victor—blinded by past betrayals—had almost accepted it. He had confronted Hannah, ordered her not to leave the property, and demanded answers by midnight.
He had kept her trapped on the estate like a sitting duck. And Gregory had used that exact window of time to take her.
“I handed her right to him,” Victor whispered, his fist clenching around Hannah’s mud-stained phone.
“We don’t know where they went,” Marcus said, pulling his weapon. “We have no license plate, no tracking signal—”
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A small voice came from the open back doorway behind them. Little Poppy was standing under the canopy, held securely by the guard, pointing her tiny finger into the storm.
“Mama has your lucky coin,” the child called out bravely over the wind. “She put it in her coat pocket before the dark car came!”
