Chapter 3 - The Empty Room and the Awakening of a Tyrant
The bitter smell of burning diesel fuel and salty sea spray still clung to Dominic Romano’s wool coat when his convoy tore back through the gates of the Hudson mansion at 3:15 a.m.
The raid at Berth Fourteen had been a ghost operation.
By the time Dominic and Victor arrived with four carloads of armed enforcers and their high-priced defense attorneys, the federal agents were nowhere to be seen.
There were no warrants filed with the clerk of the district court.
There were no confiscated shipping containers.
There was only a nervous dock master who claimed he had received an anonymous phone call warning him of an impending raid from a caller using an internal Romano family radio frequency.
Dominic had stood on the freezing pier for an hour, watching the dark water lap against the pilings, a terrifying suspicion crawling up the back of his spine like spiders.
It was a diversion.
Someone had pulled him twenty miles away from his estate on Christmas Eve with a phantom threat.
The moment his Cadillac screeched to a halt on the snow-covered gravel driveway of the mansion, Dominic threw the car door open before the tires had fully stopped spinning.
"Check the perimeter!" Dominic roared to the guards stationed by the entrance.
"Did anyone enter or leave this property while I was gone?"
The young security guard at the front doors swallowed hard, his skin turning gray under the porch lights.
"N-no, Don Dominic.
Only Miss Camilla left an hour ago in her town car with her personal luggage, just like you ordered."
Dominic did not acknowledge him.
He took the grand marble stairs three at a time, tearing off his wet gloves and casting them onto the carpet.
He bypassed his master suite entirely, racing straight up the narrow third-floor service corridor toward the attic room.
"Elena!" he shouted, throwing his entire weight against the oak door.
The door did not resist him.
It swung open with a soft, hollow creak that echoed through the silence of the room.
The brass lock had not been broken.
The window was wide open, letting swirls of fresh snow drift across the floorboards like fine white powder.
The iron bed was stripped clean of its wool blanket.
The wardrobe doors hung open, revealing empty wooden hangers swaying slightly in the winter draft.
The small wastebasket beside the fireplace contained a single, torn piece of glossy photograph paper showing a nineteen-year-old Dominic smiling into the camera.
Elena was gone.
Dominic stood in the middle of the freezing, empty room, his chest heaving as if he had just survived an explosion.
"Elena?" he called out, his voice cracking into an unrecognizable register of panic.
He spun around, tearing open the small adjacent bathroom, checking behind the shower curtain, ripping through the empty linen closets.
There was nothing.
No luggage.
No winter coats.
No note explaining where she was going.
Only the scent of her lavender soap lingering faintly against the cold drafts of the north wind.
"No, no, no," Dominic muttered, his hands flying to his hair, his fingers digging into his scalp with enough violence to draw blood.
"She didn't leave.
She couldn't leave.
She has nowhere to go."
He rushed down the service stairs like a madman, his heavy dress shoes slipping against the slick treads.
He burst into the ground-floor rotunda, where the grand Christmas tree still glittered with its thousands of golden fairy lights.
Dominic dropped to his knees onto the snowy velvet skirt beneath the pine branches, ignoring the sharp needles digging through his tailored trousers.
There, lying in the center of the white fabric like a forgotten silver tear, was the pawnshop bracelet.
The cheap metal chain was freezing to the touch.
Dominic picked it up, cradling the delicate links in his massive, scarred palm.
His mind dragged him back sixteen years, to the drafty, cockroach-infested kitchen where he had presented that exact chain to a wide-eyed girl who had looked at him as if he were an emperor.“As long as we choose each other, Dominic, we will always have a home,” she had told him, wrapping her thin arms around his neck while the radiators clanked in the background.
He had chosen power.
He had chosen alliances.
He had chosen to humiliate her before a room full of sycophants to satisfy the vanity of a society woman who despised him.
A guttural roar ripped from Dominic Romano’s throat, a sound so raw and monstrous that the guards in the foyer reached instinctively for their weapons in terror.
He threw his head back and screamed into the empty expanse of the vaulted ceiling, his knuckles crushing the silver bracelet against his chest until the metal bit into his flesh.
Victor Romano rushed into the rotunda, his gun half-drawn, stopping dead in his tracks at the sight of the ruthless Don kneeling in the dirt beneath the tree.
"Dominic!" Victor yelled, rushing forward.
"What happened?
Was there a hit team?"
Dominic rose to his feet slowly, his face drained of every drop of color, his gray eyes burning with an unhinged madness.
"She is gone," Dominic said, his voice flat, dead, and lethal.
Victor frowned, looking around the empty hall.
"Who is gone?
Elena?
Dominic, she is a maid.
She probably walked down to the village to cool off after the incident at dinner.
She will be back when she gets cold."
Dominic crossed the marble floor in two terrifying strides, his hand shooting out like a striking viper to seize his cousin by the throat, slamming Victor’s back against a fluted marble pillar.
"Never call her that again," Dominic hissed, his face inches from Victor's terrified eyes.
"She is not a maid!
She built this house!
She bled for this organization before you were old enough to carry a nine-millimeter!
She was my wife in everything but a signed piece of church paper, and I struck her!"
Victor gasped for air, his hands gripping Dominic’s iron wrists.
"Dominic...
I'm sorry...
I didn't know..."
Dominic released him, letting his cousin slide down the pillar before turning toward the wall of security monitors in the main hall.
"Lock down every bridge leading out of the five boroughs," Dominic commanded, his voice trembling with an icy rage that signaled an impending massacre.
"Wake up the precinct captains in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.
Tell them that if a blonde woman named Elena Carter boards an Amtrak train, a regional bus, or a domestic flight, their department funding ceases to exist.
Call every cab company.
Call every shelter.
I want two hundred men combing the streets before sunrise."
"Dominic, listen to reason," Victor coughed, rubbing his bruised neck.
"The family is already watching us after the slap at dinner.
If the other Five Families see you mobilizing the entire army over a domestic dispute, they will think you have lost your mind.
They will think you are weak."
Dominic turned slowly, his hand resting on the heavy grip of the custom Kimber .45 holstered beneath his arm.
"Let them think I am weak," Dominic whispered, his eyes void of sanity.
"Let them make a move.
I will slaughter every last one of them in the street, and then I will use their blood to write her name across the city.
Find her, Victor.
If you do not have a location on Elena by noon tomorrow, do not bother coming back to this house alive."
As Victor scrambled toward the communications room, Dominic looked down at his open desk in the corner of the study.
On top of his leather blotter lay a single, neatly folded sheet of white paper that had not been there when he left for the docks.
Dominic walked over with dread pooling in his stomach.
He picked up the paper.
It was not a love letter.
It was a balance sheet from Apex Maritime Logistics, showing an offshore transfer of six million dollars dated three days ago, bearing his own forged signature.
Stapled to the paper was a small yellow sticky note written in Elena’s precise, elegant handwriting.“You traded your soul for a serpent, Dominic.
Check your vault before you check your heart.”
Dominic’s breath caught in his throat.
He turned, sprinting down the hallway toward the private library where his wall safe was hidden behind an oil painting of his grandfather.
He tore the painting from the wall, letting it crash to the floor.
He entered his biometric code and pulled the heavy steel door open.
The cash bricks were untouched.
The bearer bonds were in their sleeves.
The emergency passports were in their slots.
Only one thing was missing from the vault.
May you like
The black leather ledger containing the private financial records of the Romano syndicate’s dirty money, the book that had been missing for three months.
And lying in its place on the velvet shelf was a silver hairpin belonging to Camilla Brooks.
