Chapter 2 - The Key Inside the Music Box
I had never understood the phrase cold fear until that phone call.
Fear had always felt hot to me before then. Racing heart. Sweaty palms. Breath coming too fast.
This was different.
This was ice moving slowly through my bones.
Dante took the phone from my hand.
"Trace it."
One of his men disappeared into the hall.
"Give it back."
"No."
"That is my phone."
"And someone just used it to threaten you."
"Still mine."
Dante stared at me, then handed it back.
"You are impossible."
"Apparently that runs in my family."
For the first time, he actually smiled.
It lasted less than a second.
Then his expression became hard again.
"We need to go to your apartment."
I thought of my tiny fourth-floor walk-up in Queens. The crooked kitchen cabinet. The plant on my windowsill that had somehow survived three years of neglect. The framed photograph of my parents beside my bed.
The idea of armed strangers going through it made me sick.
"I go first."
"No."
"Then we are not going."
Dante gave me a look that probably made powerful men reconsider entire business plans.
I crossed my arms.
Ten minutes later, I was in the front passenger seat of his SUV.
Orion occupied the entire back seat.
Dante drove himself.
That surprised me.
"You trust me in your car?"
"No."
"Good talk."
He glanced at me.
"I trust Orion."
"And Orion trusts me."
"That is the problem."
Rain had started by the time we reached Queens.
Two security vehicles followed us at a distance. Dante parked half a block away and let his men check the building before we entered.
My front door was unlocked.
I knew I had locked it.
Dante moved in front of me.
"Stay here."
"I live here."
"Not tonight."
He entered first.
The apartment looked untouched at first glance.
Then I saw the bedroom.
My mattress had been sliced open.
Drawers were dumped across the floor. Books ripped apart. The framed photograph of my parents lay facedown beneath the dresser, the glass shattered.
My mother's jewelry box had been emptied.
My father's old jackets were cut open at the seams.
I stood in the doorway unable to breathe.
Dante's voice softened.
"Olivia."
"Don't."
I walked past him.
The violation felt worse than the threat.
Someone had touched every piece of the life I had worked so hard to keep together.
I picked up the photograph.
My father stood behind my mother on Coney Island, both of them laughing into the wind. I had been eight. I remembered that day because Dad had won me a ridiculous purple stuffed bear and carried it home on the subway like it was royalty.
Dante crouched beside me.
"Look at the frame."
I turned it over.
The back panel had been removed.
Empty.
"They were looking for something hidden."
I stared at the picture.
"My father hated keeping documents. He used to say paper was evidence waiting to betray you."
Dante's eyes sharpened.
"That sounds like a man in witness protection."
I stood up too quickly.
"Stop turning him into one of your people. He was my father. He made pancakes on Sundays. He forgot every password he ever created. He sang terribly in the car."
"Both things can be true."
That answer made me angrier because I knew it was right.
I went into the closet and pulled down a cardboard box filled with things I had never been able to throw away.
Birthday cards.
School pictures.
My father's old watch.
I picked it up before I touched anything else. The leather strap was cracked and the glass had a thin line across one corner from the time he dropped it while trying to fix our kitchen sink. He had worn that watch every day. After his supposed death, my mother had kept it in her nightstand for years before finally giving it to me on my eighteenth birthday.
It had stopped at 6:14.
I remembered asking her once why she never had it repaired. She had looked at me for so long that I thought she had not heard. Then she said, "Some things are allowed to stop."
At the time, I thought she was talking about grief.
Now I wondered whether 6:14 meant something else.
Dante noticed the watch in my palm.
"May I see it?"
I handed it over reluctantly.
He turned it beneath the light, then pressed the crown. Nothing happened. He opened the back with the tip of his knife. Inside the casing, scratched so lightly I nearly missed it, were three letters.
G.V.M.
"Gabriel Vale Marshall," Dante said.
My stomach tightened.
My father had been carrying both names long before his fake death.
Beneath the initials was another mark: 6-14.
"June fourteenth?" I asked.
Dante's gaze sharpened. "Maybe. Or a time. Or a box number. Men who live under aliases stop writing anything plainly."
I took the watch back.
"He was not a spy."
"No."
"You sound like you think he was."
"I think he was a father who learned to survive in a world where being ordinary was no longer an option."
That answer followed me as I searched the box. It was the first time I understood that my father's secrets might not have belonged to a separate life. They might have been built around me.
A wooden music box shaped like a little house.
I froze.
Dante noticed.
"What?"
"He gave me this the week before he died."
I lifted the music box.
It was heavier than I remembered.
A painted dog sat beside the tiny front door.
Not a black hound. A brown shepherd.
My father had told me not to lose it.
At fourteen, I had assumed he meant because it was sentimental.
Now my hands began to shake.
I wound the key.
The melody played normally.
Dante took the box and turned it over.
"May I?"
It was strange that a man who had ordered armed security into my building was asking permission to open a music box.
I nodded.
He removed the bottom panel with a pocketknife.
Inside, taped beneath the mechanism, was a small brass key.
And a folded piece of paper.
My name was written on it.
Olivia.
My knees nearly gave out.
I opened the note.
Liv,
If you are reading this, then I failed to keep the past away from you. I am sorry. Your mother knows more than she ever told you, but do not hate her for it. We lied because the truth had already killed good people.
The key opens Box 314 at Grand Central's private storage annex. Do not go alone.
There is one person I hoped would never need to meet you.
Dante Moretti.
If he is still the man I believed he could become, trust him once.
After that, make him earn the rest.
Dad
I read the note twice.
Then a third time.
Dante was completely silent.
"You knew him," I whispered.
"Not as Thomas Marshall."
"But you knew him."
"Yes."
"And he knew enough about you to send me to you."
"Apparently."
I turned on him.
"What aren't you telling me?"
His jaw tightened.
"When I was twenty-three, somebody tried to kill me outside a warehouse in Brooklyn. Gabriel saved my life. Took a bullet through the shoulder. He disappeared two years later."
"Why?"
"He found evidence that someone close to my family was moving money through companies we didn't control. He believed the network reached law enforcement, unions, shipping, judges. He would never tell me the name."
"Victor Salvi."
Dante looked toward the broken bedroom.
"Victor is my father's oldest friend. My godfather. He taught me how to shoot. He stood beside me at both my parents' funerals."
"And my father told you not to trust him."
"Yes."
The word seemed to cost him something.
A noise came from the hallway.
Orion's head snapped up.
Dante pushed me behind him as the apartment door opened.
One of his guards appeared.
"Sir. We found a camera in the smoke detector. Recently installed."
My stomach dropped.
"How recently?"
"Less than forty-eight hours."
Dante's face became unreadable.
"We leave now."
I looked around my ruined apartment.
"I need clothes."
"Buy new ones."
"With what money?"
Dante stared at me.
"You are arguing about clothes while somebody put surveillance in your ceiling."
"Some of us do not have billionaire emergency wardrobes."
He exhaled through his nose.
"Five minutes."
"Ten."
"Seven."
"Deal."
I packed one bag.
Before leaving, I picked up the photograph and the music box.
At the door, Orion suddenly turned back.
He walked toward the kitchen.
"Orion," Dante called.
The dog ignored him.
He stopped in front of the refrigerator and scratched once at the floor.
I frowned.
"What is he doing?"
Orion scratched again.
I knelt.
One floor tile near the baseboard was loose.
Dante removed it.
Underneath was a plastic packet.
Inside was a memory card.
And a single red paper strip.
Three words were printed on it.
VICTOR KNOWS EVERYTHING.
Dante's face went cold.
Then a bullet shattered my kitchen window.
He hit the floor with me before I heard the second shot.
Orion lunged toward the window, barking with a violence that made the walls shake.
Dante covered my head with his body.
"Stay down."
Another bullet struck the wall.
His men shouted in the stairwell.
Then silence.
I realized Dante's hand was wrapped around mine.
Neither of us moved.
For one impossible second, amid broken glass and gun smoke, I felt safer beside the most feared man in New York than I had felt in my own home.
Then Dante looked at the memory card in my palm.
"Grand Central first," he said.
"Why?"
"Because whoever is shooting at us already knows about your apartment."
May you like
His eyes lifted to mine.
"But they may not know about Box 314."
