Chapter 8
Yelena
After midnight, the penthouse stopped pretending to be a home.
The lights went low. The lake turned black. Every locked door sounded louder. I had not slept. That was all Salvatore’s fault.
The conversation in his office kept returning in pieces. Daddy. Rules. Discipline. Aftercare. His voice asking what I wanted as if could even answer.
My body had reacted to every word. I also blamed him for that.
I sat curled into the corner of the sofa with a blanket over my legs and a book open in my lap. I had read the same paragraph nine times. Maybe on the tenth I could finally get through it. Olimpo slept against my feet, occasionally kicking in a dream.
Sal had shut himself in the office after our conversation. I had heard his low voice once through the wall. Then silence.
At twelve-seventeen, the private elevator chimed.
Olimpo’s head came up. So did mine.
Sal emerged from the office before the doors opened. His jacket was back on. His face had changed. Whatever man had discussed bedtime and spanking with me had been locked away. This was the one who moved cargo across borders and sent armed men into houses. The professional.
Tonio stepped out first, carrying two white catering jackets on hangers. Pietro followed with a mailing tube beneath one arm and a photograph in his hand. Cold air came with them. Tonio dropped the jackets across the dining table.
They looked shaken. Serious. Sal said, “Tonio. Explain.”
Tonio looked at me, deadly serious. “Yelena. We have an opportunity. But it’s dangerous. Let me ask you: how much are you willing to risk to get your brother out tonight?”
No greeting. No joke.
My body went cold in one clean sweep.
I stood. “What do you need me to do?”
Tonio and Pietro exchanged a look.
“Wait,” I backed away from the table. “If your plan is to call my father and offer me back in exchange for Kiryl, save your breath. He’ll take me and keep Kiryl. If it’s Gianni you plan to tempt, he’ll agree and shoot my brother anyway.”
“Yelena,” Sal said, shaking his head.
“I won’t be bait.”
“No. You won’t. No one’s thinking along those lines,” Pietro said.
His voice was quiet. It made the room lean toward him.
He laid the photograph on the table. An unmarked white van stood in an alley beneath a security light. The rear doors were open. Inside were stacked crates, folded tables, and racks for linen bags.
“The wedding company,” he said. “They were meant to collect tomorrow afternoon. But the house ordered everything gone tonight. All the items that should have been used in the wedding—removed early.”
“Why?”
“Lev does not like reminders,” Sal said.
That sounded like my father sure enough.
Pietro uncapped the mailing tube and slid out a floor plan. He spread it over the dining table.
“The collection crew arrives at two,” he said. “The company uses temporary workers. We put Tonio in a jacket and add him to the crew. He enters through the service gate. I wait outside with this van.”
Tonio lifted one of the jackets. “I look excellent in white.” Then, with a shrug, “I look excellent in everything.”
“You look like a refrigerator repairman,” I said automatically.
His grin appeared. “She likes it.”
I ignored him.
My attention had fixed on the plan.
It was an old document. Fifteen years, perhaps twenty. Almost certainly out of date. The kitchen had been renovated since. The east corridor had changed after my mother died. My father had walled off the old breakfast room and turned half of it into storage.
Pietro tapped the eastern side of the house. “We need you for two things. First, the fastest route from the service entrance to the blue room.”
“And second?”
“Kiryl.”
My hand tightened on the back of a chair.
“Obivously, he will not open a guarded door for a strange man,” Pietro continued. “Especially one carrying a gun and claiming you sent him.”
“No,” I said. “He won’t.”
Tonio leaned over the plan. He smelled faintly of cold air, coffee, and whatever he had cooked hours earlier.
“We get to the room,” he said. “You speak to him through the earpiece. I put him in the other jacket. We walk out with the collection crew.”
“You think it will be that simple?”
“No,” Sal said. “Something will fuck up. But so long as we’re expecting it, we can adapt.”
The bluntness made me look at him.
He stood at the end of the table with both hands resting on the chair in front of him. He was not trying to soften the danger for me. I respected that.
“It is the cleanest opportunity,” he said. “That does not make it safe—not exactly. If you refuse, we attempt another method.”
“Which method?”
His pause told me enough.
“One involving more guns,” I said.
“A lot more guns.”
“And more of my father’s men dying.”
“Possibly.”
Tonio’s expression sobered. “This window of opportunity will close. By daylight, Lev increases the guard. He may move Kiryl. Gianni may insist on it.”
The thought landed hard.
Gianni would move him somewhere I did not know. Somewhere without staff. Somewhere my knowledge meant nothing.
I bent over the plan.
“Your entrance is wrong,” I said.
Pietro came closer. “Show me.”
“The catering crews don’t use this door anymore.
It sticks in winter and opens directly toward the guard station.
They use the loading bay beside the kitchen.
” I traced the route. “You come through here. Past dry storage. Not through the main kitchen. Svetlana—the house cook—will still be awake if the collection is happening. She knows every regular worker.”
“No names,” Sal said quietly, reminding me of operational discipline.
I corrected myself. “The cook knows every regular worker. If she sees Tonio, she’ll remember him.”
“Most women do,” Tonio said, with a grin.
Pietro looked at him. “My god, Tonio.”
“What? This is relevant.”
I moved my finger along the paper. “The passage behind the wine cellar avoids the kitchen. It is narrow. There’s a turn here that isn’t shown. Then the old flower room. Then the east stairs.”
Pietro made notes.
My pulse had accelerated. Not panic now. Purpose.
I knew this house. Every door that swelled in rain. Every board that complained. Every camera my father believed no one noticed.
Sal watched me across the plan.
“You may still say no,” he said.
I met his eyes. He meant it.
He had created an opportunity and handed the final choice back to me. No debt in his voice. No accusation. No statement that a good sister would do it.
The decision sat in my hands.
Mine.
I looked down at the blue room marked on the plan.
“Give me that earpiece,” I said.
At one fifty-eight, Angela’s voice entered my ear from Chicago even though she was only a few miles away, routed through military-grade encryption.
“Check.”
“I hear you.”
“Tonio?”
“Unfortunately,” he whispered.
Pietro’s voice followed. “Approaching the gate.”
I sat at the penthouse dining table with the Mill Basin plan spread before me. Sal stood beside my chair. His forearm rested near mine on the table, close enough that the warmth of him reached me when I moved.
The photograph of the white van lay near his hand.
Angela spoke again. “The catering van is entering the outer gate. Pietro is in the second vehicle two blocks south. No activity on the police band.”
A burst of static sounded in my ear. Then Tonio’s breathing.
“Guard’s checking the manifest,” he murmured.
“Don’t speak,” I said.
“Yes, boss.”
“Tonio.”
Silence.
The seconds lengthened.
I imagined the guard beneath the hard white lamp. The clipboard. The driver’s face. Tonio in his catering jacket, too large and too alert to look like a man paid by the hour to move tables.
“Gate opening,” Angela said.
I released a breath.
“Rolling,” Pietro confirmed.
Through Tonio’s microphone came the rattle of equipment and the uneven hum of the van’s engine. A man I didn’t know said something about starting with the dining room. Tonio answered in an accent broader than usual, making himself sound more foreign and less memorable.
The vehicle stopped. Doors opened. Metal struck pavement. Wheels squeaked. Men complained about the cold.
“Inside the loading bay,” Tonio whispered.
“Do you see three doors?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Left goes to the kitchen. Center is dry storage. Right is mechanical.”
“The plan says center connects to the main hall.”
“The plan is a liar, remember?”
“Like a beautiful woman.”
“Go through dry storage.”
Sal’s fingers shifted beside the photograph. He did not interrupt.
I heard a door open. The sound changed. Tighter now. Walls close to Tonio’s microphone. “Shelves,” he said. “Flour, canned tomatoes, enough garlic to season Sicily.”
“Move to the rear. There should be a fire door behind the shelving.”
“There is no door.”
“Yes, there is.”
“I am looking at a wall.”
“Third shelf from the left. It’s built into the panel. The handle is behind the hanging aprons.”
A pause.
Then: “You are terrifying.”
The door clicked.
I could see it in my mind. Narrow, painted the same cream as the wall. My mother had used that route when she didn’t want dinner guests seeing staff cross the public rooms.
“Straight ahead,” I said. “You’ll pass the wine cellar on your right.”
“Passing it.”
“Do not turn left after the cellar. The plan shows a corridor there. It was closed.”
“Why?”
“My father disliked looking at the old breakfast room.”
Tonio did not joke about that. His footsteps remained soft.
“Ten feet ahead, there’s a narrow opening on your left. It looks like a linen closet.”
“I see it.”
“Go through. Then right.”
“There’s a stair.”
“Do not take it. It comes out opposite the upstairs guard post.”
The line crackled.
A different sound came through.
Shoes.
Measured. Approaching. Tonio stopped breathing.
“He’s early,” I whispered.
Sal bent closer to the plan. “Who?”
“There shouldn’t be a guard in that corridor until two-fifteen.”
The shoes came nearer.
Tonio had nowhere to go. Wine cellar behind him. Open passage ahead. If he returned to dry storage, he would meet the collection crew.
My eyes moved across the house I could no longer see. Flower room.
“Tonio. Three steps forward. Door on your right.”
“I have two.”