Chapter 1 - THE CLOSET DOOR
Vincent Torino came home to Lake Forest three hours early and nearly walked straight into his own execution.
Elena Ruiz caught him halfway up the marble staircase, grabbed his sleeve with both hands, and dragged him into the dark walk-in closet beside his bedroom. She had worked in the Torino house for three years and had never once touched him without permission. Now her hands were shaking so badly that her fingernails scraped his wrist.
“Don’t make a sound,” she whispered. “They think you’re still downtown.”
Through the narrow crack in the closet door, Vincent watched his bedroom lights snap on. A drawer opened. Someone cursed. Metal struck wood.
Then came a voice he knew better than almost any other.
“Check the safe again.”
Marcus.
His nephew.
The child Vincent had raised after Luca Torino died on a wet Chicago street twenty-two years earlier.
Marcus was twenty-seven now, wearing a tan jacket and holding a metal baseball bat loosely in one hand. Two armed men searched the room around him. Neither belonged to Vincent’s crew. One slid the portrait of Vincent’s grandfather aside and opened the wall safe.
“Cash. Jewelry. Nothing else.”
Marcus looked disgusted.
“He keeps the real records somewhere else.”
One of the men asked, “What do we do when he gets back?”
Marcus did not hesitate.
“We keep him alive until he tells us where the black ledger is.”
Vincent remained perfectly still.
Beside him, Elena lifted the hem of her dark-blue uniform enough to show him the pistol tucked at her hip.
His eyes narrowed.
She whispered, “I found it taped under the drawer in Marcus’s guest room.”
Vincent slowly lowered her hand from the weapon.
“No shooting unless they open this door.”
“They came to kill you.”
“No.”
He kept watching Marcus.
“They came because somebody made him believe he has a reason.”
Then another man entered the bedroom.
Tony DeMarco.
Vincent’s security chief for twenty-two years.
The man who controlled the estate cameras, alarm codes, guards, gate access, and Vincent’s travel schedule.
The reason three armed men could walk into the safest house Vincent owned without triggering a single alarm suddenly became obvious.
This had never been a break-in.
Tony had opened the door.
Marcus turned toward him.
“You sure Vincent has it?”
Tony nodded. “He’s kept that ledger since your father died.”
“And it proves he ordered the hit?”
“It proves enough.”
Vincent’s jaw tightened.
Elena looked at him.
“Tony told Marcus you killed Luca?”
“For how long?”
“Months. Maybe longer.”
Outside, Marcus said, “He took my father from me. Tonight he tells me why.”
That sentence hurt in a place Vincent had spent twenty-two years refusing to touch.
Elena whispered, “What’s really in the ledger?”
Vincent reached behind a row of suits and inserted a brass key into a lock almost invisible in the paneling.
A narrow compartment opened.
Inside rested a black leather ledger.
Beneath it sat a cassette recorder.
Across the tape, in Luca’s handwriting, were four words:
FOR VINCENT — IF I FAIL.
The bedroom floor creaked.
Footsteps approached the closet.
Vincent lifted the ledger.
The handle began to turn.
May you like
Tony saw through the opening what Vincent was holding.
And the color left his face.
