Chapter 2 - The Woman Who Had Been Dead for Eight Years
By midnight, the restaurant had become a crime scene.
By one in the morning, my life had become one too.
I sat in the back of Victor Castellano's armored sedan with an ice pack pressed against my shoulder and stared through rain-streaked glass at Manhattan sliding past.
I had refused an ambulance.
I had refused the police officer who suggested I go home.
And when Victor told me that going home was the one thing I absolutely could not do, I had nearly slapped him.
Then he showed me the security photograph again.
My mother.
Alive.
Standing across the street while a man tried to murder Victor.
After that, I stopped arguing.
Victor sat opposite me in the rear-facing seat. He had changed nothing about himself except the bloodied handkerchief pressed against the cut on his cheek. His tuxedo jacket was torn. His tie was gone. His white shirt carried a streak of gray dust from the restaurant floor.
Yet somehow, he still looked controlled.
I hated him for that.
"Say something," I demanded.
His gray eyes lifted to mine.
"About what?"
"About the fact that my dead mother apparently attends assassination attempts. Pick a topic."
He leaned back.
"I don't know enough yet."
"You know what the red ledger is."
Silence.
I tightened my grip on the ice pack.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Look at me like you're deciding which version of the truth I can handle."
For the first time, something in his expression shifted.
"You're right."
I blinked.
That was not the response I expected.
Victor looked toward the dark window.
"There was a ledger," he said. "Red leather. Handwritten. My father kept it locked in a private safe for years."
"Your father?"
"Marco Castellano."
I knew the name.
Everyone in New York did.
Marco Castellano had been one of the most powerful organized-crime figures on the East Coast before his death eight years earlier. Newspapers had called it an internal dispute. The official story was that he had been shot in a warehouse by rivals and that no one had ever been convicted.
Eight years.
The same year my father died.
A cold pressure built in my chest.
"What was in the ledger?"
Victor's jaw tightened.
"Names. Payments. Agreements. Judges. Police. Contractors. Politicians. Men who pretended they had never met my father and men who owed their careers to him."
"And criminals?"
"Plenty."
"Including you?"
His gaze returned to me.
"I was twenty-four when my father died. My name wasn't in it."
I laughed without humor.
"Convenient."
"True."
The car turned beneath a stone archway and descended into a private underground garage.
"Where are we?"
"My residence."
I stared at him.
"Absolutely not."
"Your apartment may already be compromised."
"You don't know that."
"The man who attacked me knew your full name and your father. Someone had access to your employment schedule. Your mother, who has apparently been legally dead for years, was photographed outside. And five members of my security detail disappeared at the exact moment an assassin entered the restaurant."
He opened the car door.
"Tonight, I know enough."
I wanted to argue.
Instead, I followed him.
The penthouse occupied the top three floors of a limestone building on the Upper East Side. I expected gold, marble, and evidence of a man who enjoyed being rich.
What I found was quieter.
Dark wood. Books. Modern paintings. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. A piano no one seemed to play. Security doors hidden inside elegant walls.
Two men checked every room before Victor allowed me beyond the entry hall.
"Do you always live like this?" I asked.
"Only when people are trying to kill me."
"So always?"
A corner of his mouth moved.
"More often than I'd like."
He led me into a study.
The room had shelves from floor to ceiling and a large desk facing the windows.
Victor opened a safe concealed behind a painting.
Inside were documents, two handguns, several passports, and a small black box.
He removed a thin file.
"I haven't looked at this in years," he said.
He placed it in front of me.
My father's face stared up from the first page.
I forgot how to breathe.
The photograph had been taken long before he died. He was younger, maybe forty. His hair was thicker. His familiar crooked smile was there.
But he wasn't standing in his gym.
He was standing beside Marco Castellano.
Victor's father.
The two men had their arms crossed, both looking irritated at whoever held the camera.
"What is this?"
"Your father worked for mine."
I looked up so quickly my chair scraped backward.
"No."
"His gym was real. So was the boxing program. But several nights a week, Thomas Carter worked private security for my father."
"My father hated criminals."
Victor nodded slowly.
"Which is probably why my father trusted him."
"That makes no sense."
"My father was not a good man, Lily. I'm not going to insult you by pretending otherwise. But powerful men don't survive by trusting people who flatter them. Thomas told him the truth. Apparently, that made him valuable."
My hands trembled as I turned the page.
Invoices.
Photographs.
A security pass with my father's picture.
A note written in blue ink.
T. Carter — reliable. Keep away from Sal.
I pointed at it.
"Who's Sal?"
Victor did not answer immediately.
I already knew that meant I wasn't going to like it.
"My uncle," he said. "Salvatore Castellano."
I had heard of him, too.
Older than Marco. More private. A man who appeared in society photographs beside governors and charity boards, never beside crime scenes.
"What does he have to do with my father?"
"I don't know everything."
"Tell me what you do know."
Victor walked to the window.
For a moment, the most feared man in New York looked exhausted.
"Three days before my father died, he called me from a secure number. He told me that someone close to him had been stealing money and making agreements he had never approved. He said he had proof."
"The ledger."
"I think so."
"And?"
"And he told me if anything happened to him, I was not to trust my uncle."
I stared at him.
"Three days later, Marco was dead."
"Yes."
"And my father?"
Victor turned.
"Your father died the next night."
A terrible quiet filled the study.
For eight years, those two deaths had existed in separate parts of my mind.
My father's hit-and-run.
A mafia boss's murder.
Now they sat next to each other like pieces of the same broken picture.
"Why didn't you come to us?"
His expression tightened.
"I tried."
I froze.
"What?"
"I found your father's address in a file. I went there four days after his death."
"I was there."
"No. The apartment was empty."
I frowned.
Then I remembered.
My mother had taken me to my aunt's house in Connecticut immediately after the funeral. She had said she couldn't bear to stay in Queens.
Six months later, I received the call that she had died in a car fire on a rural road.
There had been no viewing.
The casket had remained closed because of the condition of the body.
I had been sixteen.
Grief had made every adult decision sound reasonable.
Now each one sounded like a warning.
"Did you know my mother?"
"No."
"Have you ever seen the woman in that photograph?"
"Not before tonight."
I searched his face for a lie.
I wasn't sure what one looked like on Victor Castellano.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
We both looked at it.
Unknown number.
Victor stepped toward me.
"Don't answer."
I laughed bitterly.
"You really think that's going to work?"
"Put it on speaker."
I hesitated.
Then I answered.
"Hello?"
Nothing.
For three seconds, all I heard was faint static.
Then a woman's voice whispered my name.
"Lily."
The room disappeared around me.
My knees weakened.
I knew that voice.
Not because it sounded exactly the same. Eight years had roughened it. Fear had changed it.
But some sounds live in your bones.
"Mom?"
Victor went completely still.
A breath broke through the phone.
"Oh, baby."
My eyes filled instantly.
I covered my mouth.
For years, I had dreamed about hearing those two words again.
I had imagined my mother walking through a door, apologizing for leaving, holding me until every lonely birthday and Christmas stopped hurting.
But the woman on the phone did not sound like a miracle.
She sounded terrified.
"Where are you?" I asked. "Why did you let me think you were dead? What happened tonight?"
"I can't explain now."
"You have had eight years."
"Lily, listen to me. You are in danger."
I looked at Victor.
"I noticed."
"You need to leave him."
My breath stopped.
Victor's expression didn't change, but his eyes hardened.
"Who?"
"Victor Castellano."
"How do you know I'm with him?"
Silence.
Then my mother said something that froze every drop of blood in my body.
"Because I knew he would take you home after what happened."
Victor took the phone from my hand.
"Eleanor Carter."
My mother's breathing sharpened.
"You sound like your father."
"You knew him?"
"I knew enough."
"Then tell me where you are."
"No."
"You were outside the restaurant."
"Yes."
"Did you help the attacker escape?"
A pause.
"No."
"Then why were you there?"
"To stop him."
I grabbed the phone back.
"Stop who?"
"The man who came through those doors. His name is Darius Kane. He killed your father."
My hand went numb.
Victor's face changed.
"That's impossible," he said.
My mother heard him.
"No, Victor. What's impossible is that you still believe the story your family sold you."
"What story?"
Her voice hardened.
"That Marco Castellano was the target eight years ago."
Victor stared at the phone.
"He was murdered."
"Yes. But Marco wasn't the man they were trying to silence."
My heart pounded.
"Mom, who were they trying to silence?"
She whispered the answer.
"Your father."
Then the line went dead.
I stood in Victor Castellano's study with tears on my face, my dead mother's voice still echoing in the room, and a photograph of my father beside a mafia king on the desk between us.
Victor reached for his phone.
I stopped him.
"No."
He looked at me.
"I'm tracing the call."
"She told me to leave you."
His expression went unreadable.
"I heard her."
"Maybe I should."
For several seconds, neither of us moved.
Then Victor opened the file again and pulled out one final photograph.
He slid it across the desk.
My father stood beside Marco Castellano outside a warehouse.
Between them was a third man.
Tall.
Silver-haired.
Smiling.
Victor tapped the man's face.
"My uncle Salvatore."
I looked closer.
There was a date printed in the corner.
Two days before my father died.
And on the back, in my father's handwriting, were six words.
If Marco falls, Sal did it.
I looked at Victor.
May you like
He looked at me.
And suddenly neither of us knew which family had lied more.
