Chapter 2 - The Whispers in the Ledger
By midnight, the mansion had grown even quieter, but sleep was miles away.
I sat at the small wooden desk in my cramped quarters on the ground-floor staff wing, staring at my laptop screen. My official title was estate maintenance and groundskeeper, but the truth was much messier. I had taken the job under an assumed name because my brother, a low-level accountant for a Chicago shipping firm, had vanished three weeks ago after uncovering millions in untraceable cartel kickbacks. The last place his digital trail pointed before his phone went dead was the Moretti estate.
I hadn’t planned on confronting Vincent Moretti tonight. I certainly hadn’t planned on staging a clumsy aquatic invasion of his high-level strategy meeting. But the brief glimpse I caught of the documents spread across that black table changed everything.
On the top of the map lay a corporate letterhead bearing my brother’s employer: Vanguard Logistics.
A soft knock rattled my door.
I scrambled to close the browser tab, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I pulled the door open an inch, ready to make up an excuse about being awake late to fix a fuse.
Marco stood in the hallway, looking completely out of place without his suit jacket, holding a thick, manila folder bound with a red rubber band. His scarred face remained expressionless, but his eyes were sharp.
“The boss told me to give this to you,” Marco said, holding out the folder.
I didn't reach for it immediately. “The boss? Vincent? Why would he send me anything?”
“Read it,” Marco grunted. “And keep your voice down. The walls in this wing are thin, and the night shift isn't as blind as you think.”
I snatched the folder from his calloused hand. “What is this?”
“It’s the maintenance ledger for the west wing guest suites,” Marco said quietly, leaning against the doorframe. “Including the suite your brother stayed in three weeks ago before he took a sudden, permanent vacation to South America.”
My breath hitched. The room seemed to tilt sideways. I grabbed the edge of the door to steady myself. “You... you know who I am?”
“Vincent knows everything that enters this house, Elena,” Marco said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “He knew your real name on day one. He knew about your brother’s mess at Vanguard Logistics before the kid even packed his bags. You thought you were playing spy, slipping into the lion’s den to look for answers? The lion watched you walk right through the front gate and handed you a mop.”
Panic surged hot and sharp through my veins. If Vincent knew who I was all along, why hadn't he thrown me out? Why let me stay? Why smile at a flooded hallway?
“Is he going to kill me?” I asked, my voice barely a breath.
Marco gave a dry, humorless huff of air. “If the boss wanted you dead, you wouldn't have made it past the driveway eleven days ago. Open the folder, Elena. He’s not giving you an execution order. He’s giving you a choice.”
Before I could ask another question, Marco pushed off the doorframe and walked down the dimly lit corridor, melting into the shadows like he’d never been there at all.
I slammed the door, locked it with a double deadbolt, and carried the manila folder over to my small desk. My fingers trembled as I snapped the red rubber band and tipped the contents out onto the wood.
A single sheet of paper fluttered down, covered in Vincent Moretti’s sharp, aggressive handwriting.
Beneath it was a photograph of my missing brother, sitting across a restaurant table in downtown Chicago—talking calmly to a man whose face I instantly recognized from the conference table earlier that evening.
May you like
It wasn't Vincent. It was Marco’s second-in-command, a ruthless enforcer named Dante. And scrawled across the bottom of the photo in black ink were three words that sent ice water straight through my veins:
He’s still alive.
