Chapter 3 - Shadows of the Estate
I didn't draw my gun. If I drew my weapon now, the noise of a slide racking or a sudden execution inside these walls would shatter the fragile, miraculous threads of my daughters' voices.
Instead, I stepped into the dark passage and closed the panel behind me, leaving it cracked by a mere fraction of an inch.
The air in the hidden hallway smelled of damp concrete, old copper wiring, and the distinct, cloying scent of menthol and clove. I descended the narrow spiral stairs silently, my rubber-soled dress shoes making no sound against the stone.
The passage ran the entire length of the east wing, originally designed during Prohibition to move crates of Canadian whiskey from the underground driveway into the cellar vault. It had three access points: the library, the master suite, and the old wine cellar behind the pantry.
As I reached the bottom landing, I heard voices echoing faintly through the concrete conduit.
“…told you he wouldn’t be back until eight!” a woman’s voice snapped. Mrs. Donnelly.
She had been with my family for twelve years. She had cooked our meals, managed the cleaning staff, and held my daughters when they were infants. She was sixty-two, wore thick reading glasses on a silver chain, and wept openly at Isabelle’s funeral.
“The Newark docks wrapped up early,” a man’s raspy voice replied. Pauly. “His men finished the sweep in Elizabeth before noon. He’s here, Martha. I saw his car in the driveway.”
“Is the file still in his safe?”
“It doesn't matter where the file is,” Pauly growled, the rasp in his lungs heavy with years of tobacco. “What matters is what those little brats saw. You told me they were mute! You told me they hadn't said a word in a year!”
“They haven't!” Mrs. Donnelly’s voice trembled, slipping from her usual crisp, authoritative tone into something desperate. “They haven't spoken to me, they haven't spoken to the doctors, they haven't even spoken to Dominic! They just sit there!”
“Well, the new girl—the Bennett bitch—she’s got them talking,” Pauly spat. “I heard them from the passage twenty minutes ago. They were singing, Martha. Singing. If they tell Dominic about the Garden City parking lot, if they tell him I was the one who signaled the car—”
“He’ll skin us both alive,” Mrs. Donnelly whispered.
I stood in the darkness of the corridor, three feet away from the iron grate that looked into the wine cellar.
My lungs burned. My hands, resting against the cold stone, didn't shake. They turned to ice.
It hadn't been an outside family. It hadn't been the Commission in Chicago or the rival crews from Brooklyn. It had been my own blood, my own house manager, selling out my wife to cover a multi-million-dollar skimming operation in the Newark freight yards that Isabelle had accidentally uncovered on an iPad spreadsheet two days before she died.
They hadn't targeted the girls. But the girls had been in the back of the station wagon when the shooter approached the driver's side window. They had watched through the tinted glass as their mother died, and then they had seen their great-uncle Pauly step out of a parked sedan across the street, wave the shooter away, and walk toward the school.
They hadn't lost their speech because of the trauma of the gunshots alone.
They had gone silent because they realized the monster who killed their mother lived inside their walls, and every time they looked at adults, they didn't know who was safe.
May you like
Except for Grace. A stranger who had no ties to the Romano name.
I stepped away from the grate, turned, and glided back up the stone stairs toward the library.
