Chapter 2 - Ghosts in the Walnut Panel
My throat turned to dry ash. The blood in my veins felt like ice water.
My father, Antonio Romano, had been dead for six years. He had died in a private wing of St. Jude’s Hospital with three priest-blessed rosaries wrapped around his hands and three armed men standing outside the door. I had watched the monitor flatline myself. I had carried his casket.
“Olivia,” I whispered, dropping to one knee so my eyes were level with hers. It was the first time I had spoken her name and had her look back at me in over a year. “Your grandfather is gone. He died a long time ago.”
Olivia didn't blink. She reached out her small, pale hand and touched the heavy gilded frame of the portrait. “Not him, Daddy. The man who looks like him. He has the same eyes. He smells like cold smoke and mint.”
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped beast.
Cold smoke and mint.
There was only one man in the entire tri-state area who smelled of clove cigarettes and menthol lozenges, a man who shared my father’s striking, dark-eyed Romano features because he was my father’s half-brother.
Uncle Uncle Paul. Pauly "The Weasel" Romano.
Pauly was supposed to be running our legal import operations out of a cramped office in Newark. He was fifty-eight, walked with a slight limp from a botched hit in the nineties, and had always been treated as the weak link in the family—a man who handled logistics, paid off port inspectors, and kept his mouth shut.
“He comes through the wall,” Sophie said softly, leaning her cheek against Grace’s apron. “When you’re not here, Daddy. He talks to Mrs. Donnelly.”
I stood up slowly. The air in the library suddenly felt thick, poisoned.
Grace was watching me, her gray eyes sharp, reading every shift in my posture. She wasn't just a housekeeper scared of a mob boss anymore; she was a woman trying to figure out if the man standing in front of her was going to bring violence into the room with his children.
“Grace,” I said, keeping my tone strictly controlled. “Take the girls upstairs to the nursery. Lock the door from the inside. Do not open it for anyone except me. Not Mrs. Donnelly, not the guards outside, no one.”
Grace didn't argue. She didn't ask questions. She simply gathered Nora into her arms, took Sophie and Olivia by their hands, and led them toward the main staircase.
Once the sound of their small footsteps faded on the upper landing, I walked over to the portrait of my father.
I reached out and grasped the thick carved walnut frame. I pulled. It didn't budge. I ran my fingers down the right edge, searching for the hidden pressure latch my father had installed forty years ago when he built his panic routes during the Castellano wars.
Click.
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The entire section of the walnut paneling swung inward three inches, revealing a pitch-black staircase leading down into the foundations of the mansion.
And there, resting on the top step, fresh and barely smoldering in the damp draft of the hidden passage, was the crushed butt of a clove cigarette.
