Chapter 27
BEA
The drive takes two hours.
I watch the city disappear in the side mirror.
The skyscrapers shrink first—the financial district, then the bridges, then the long industrial sprawl that bleeds into the highway.
Then there’s just road. The sun comes up while we drive—a pale rim along the horizon first, then the long color, then a clean morning.
Raffaele’s on the phone for most of it.
He doesn’t put it on speaker. He talks low, in clipped sentences, about names I don’t recognize and rotations and timelines and which crews can be trusted with what.
I don’t interrupt.
I lean my head against the cool of the window and let the road do its work. I haven’t been outside the city in five years. The last time I left was for a funeral, in a town I’d never been to, and the bus ride out felt like exile. This is so much different.
The exits come and go. The salt smell starts somewhere around exit ninety-eight. By a hundred and four the road’s narrowed to two lanes, there are scrub pines on either side, and I can hear the gulls before I can see the ocean.
We turn off.
A long gravel drive. Trees crowding it on both sides, then thinning, then opening.
I sit forward.
“Oh.”
The house is even more beautiful in person.
It’s modern. Three stories of glass and clean lines on a low rise, the ocean spread out behind it like the whole sky’s been laid down on the ground.
There’s a porch that wraps around the side I can see.
There’s a path through the grasses down to a private stretch of beach.
No other house in either direction for what looks like a quarter mile.
This is ours.
I have to say it inside my head twice before I believe it. This is ours.
The car stops at the top of the drive.
I step out. The air’s cold and clean and full of salt. My shoes crunch on the gravel. I tip my head back and breathe in once, deep, and a tightness in my chest unwinds a notch for the first time in three weeks.
Maybe this could work.
Maybe we could—
I turn around.
Three SUVs.
They’re pulling up behind us in a tight line, gravel popping under the tires.
Doors open. Men in dark suits step out—six that I can see right away, more in the third vehicle, all of them with earpieces, all of them with that cut to the jacket that means they’re armed.
One’s already walking toward the side of the house with what looks like a long black case. Another’s unfolding a tablet.
Raffaele’s out of the car ahead of me. Already on the phone. He’s crossed to the closest of the men, and he’s pointing at the corner of the house where the path heads down to the beach, and the man’s nodding.
The beautiful view is ruined.
It happens fast. Within a minute, the perimeter is being secured—men walking the property line, men checking the angles of the house, men setting up a small antenna thing near the driveway. The house has been ours for forty-five seconds, and there are already eight strangers on the grass.
I cross to him.
He’s still on the phone. “I want eyes on the dune line for the next forty-eight hours, minimum. Two on the road. One at the back deck.”
I’m standing three feet from him, and he hasn’t registered my presence.
“Raffaele.”
He holds up a finger. One minute.
I bite my tongue and wait.
The call rolls into another call. He says something to one of the men, who then jogs off toward the back of the house.
“Raffaele.”
“Hold on—”
“Don’t you want to see our new house?”
He finally looks at me. “What?”
“The house. The one you just bought. The one you bought for us. Do you want to go inside? Look at it? Together?”
“I—”
He glances at his phone. At the SUV. At the man with the tablet. Then back at me.
“Give me five minutes. I just need to make sure the perimeter—”
A motorbike.
It cuts through the morning. We both turn. The bike comes up the gravel drive too fast, throws up a spray of stones, and skids to a stop ten feet from us.
Lorenzo.
He pulls his helmet off. His hair’s flat with sweat. His jacket’s rucked up at the side like he dressed in a hurry. There’s a bruise blooming on his cheekbone that wasn’t there yesterday.
“Boss. We’ve got a problem.”
Raffaele’s already crossing to him.
“What happened?”
“Nico’s people. They moved on the brownstone last night. Took it. Whole place is theirs as of about three AM.”
“How many?”
“A dozen. Maybe. They’re setting up like they own the building. I had to crawl out the servants’ stair like a fucking housemaid.” Lorenzo wipes his face. “There’s something else.”
“What?”
“The vault. Upstairs. Saw two of them down there trying to crack it on my way out. Weren’t getting anywhere, but they were trying hard. They want whatever’s in it.”
Raffaele stiffens. “The will.”
“The what?”
“Vincenzo’s will. The one that names the heir,” he explains. “Vincenzo kept it in a vault. He never trusted Nico. Figured he’d try to amend it the morning he died. If Nico cracks it before I do, then it’s over.”
Lorenzo whistles low. “So, if we get there first—”
“Then I’ve got legal proof of what the old man actually wanted. Whatever name’s on that document. I’d bet it’s not Nico’s.”
Raffaele’s already moving back toward the SUV.
“Get the men ready. We leave in ten.”
“On it.” Lorenzo’s back on the bike before he’s finished speaking.
I watch the two of them. I observe the urgency.
The way the other men respond to it without being told.
The third SUV’s engine starts, the man with the tablet folds it and jogs back, the perimeter stops being a perimeter and starts being a convoy.
Raffaele hasn’t looked at me again. He’s checking the magazine in a gun he pulled out of nowhere. His phone’s back at his ear.
I’ve stopped existing for him.
The realization arrives quietly.
I’m not going to let him drive away.
“Raffaele.”
He doesn’t stop.
“Stay inside. Don’t open the door for anyone. There will be at least four men on the property at all times—”
“You promised.”
He stops.
He turns.
“Promised what, exactly?”
It’s not gentle. It’s the question of a man making me say it.
What did he promise? He didn’t promise, in a sentence, that we’d be together. He didn’t promise we’d walk into our new house through the front door and look at the kitchen. He didn’t promise me one concrete thing that he’s currently failing to do.
He promised it without saying it. I heard it last night on the cabinet. I heard it in the brochure. I heard it in we have a house.
I heard it.
I have to say it out loud anyway, and it sounds stupid the second it leaves my lips.
“That we’d—that we’d buy a house. And just—be in it. Just for a—” My voice is failing. “Just one day, Raffaele. Just walk inside it. With me. Once.”
His face changes.
“My father,” he says, “was murdered yesterday. Shot in a basement like a dog by his own son. And you want to walk around our new house?”
“That’s not—”
“I bought this house to keep you alive. I didn’t buy it for a honeymoon.
I didn’t buy it so you could pick out drapes for the sunroom while Nico Conti plops into the throne I’ve spent twenty years protecting.
I don’t get to sit in this driveway and look at the ocean while his men crack a vault that has my future inside it. ”
“Raffaele—”
He steps closer. Not in a kind way.
“He killed Vincenzo, Bea. Do you understand that? The man who took me off the street when I was fifteen and gave me everything I have. The closest thing I’ve ever had to a father. Shot in a chair. And his killer’s in his office right now, with his boots on the rug, and you want me to come inside.”
“That’s not what I—”
“I’m going to put him in the ground. That’s the only thing I’m doing today. It’s the only thing I’m doing tomorrow. It’s the only thing I’m doing until it’s done. Are we clear?”
I stare at him.
I’m not looking at the man who held my face last night and almost said the word only I had the courage to say. This is someone else.
“Why do you have to be like this?” I ask.
“Because I’m a killer, Bea,” he snaps back. “That’s what I am. That’s what I’ve always been. Killers kill. That’s what I’m about to do.”
He turns away.
“Stay inside. Don’t open the door for anyone.”
“Raffaele.”
He marches off.
“Raffaele!”
The SUV door slams. The engine wakes up. The other two fall into formation around it. Lorenzo’s bike pulls in front. The convoy starts down the drive in a low, careful line, gravel ticking under the tires.
And then he’s gone, and I’m left shivering in the cold morning air. Alone.