Chapter 2 - The Warning Behind the Walls
Adrian did not reach for his phone again. Instead, he studied my face as though the answer might be hidden there.
"Tell me everything," he said.
I told him about the footsteps, the note, and the night I had seen Dean leaving the locked west corridor with a key that belonged to Adrian's private office. I had heard Dean whisper into a phone: "The shipment isn't the point. Moretti won't survive Sunday."
Adrian's expression went still. Sunday was two days away.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because I thought you'd believe him."
He looked at my bare feet on the marble. "I gave you every reason to think this house was safe. I was wrong."
He called his security chief, Gabriel Torres, and ordered him to come alone. Then he took the fireplace poker from my hand and placed it beside the wall.
"You will not sleep on a floor again," he said. "And you will not be sent anywhere without your agreement."
He offered me the sitting room adjoining his suite, where the door locked from the inside. I accepted, but only after he promised not to confront Dean before they found proof.
At dawn Gabriel returned with the hallway surveillance footage. Someone had erased six minutes from the servants' wing camera on four consecutive nights.
"Dean has access?" Adrian asked.
Gabriel hesitated. "So do I. And so does your brother."
Adrian's younger brother, Luca Moretti, had been back in New York for only a month.
I remembered something else: a silver cuff link I had found beside my door, shaped like a wolf's head.
When I showed it to Adrian, the color drained from his face.
May you like
"That belonged to my father," he said. "He left the pair to Luca."
And suddenly the danger had a name neither of us wanted to say.
