I’m not looking at the man who held my face last night and almost said the word only I had the courage to say. This is someone else.
“Why do you have to be like this?” I ask.
“Because I’m a killer, Bea,” he snaps back. “That’s what I am. That’s what I’ve always been. Killers kill. That’s what I’m about to do.”
He turns away.
“Stay inside. Don’t open the door for anyone.”
“Raffaele.”
He marches off.
“Raffaele!”
The SUV door slams. The engine wakes up. The other two fall into formation around it. Lorenzo’s bike pulls in front. The convoy starts down the drive in a low, careful line, gravel ticking under the tires.
And then he’s gone, and I’m left shivering in the cold morning air. Alone.
28
RAFFAELE
The estate is two and a half hours back from Sea Bright.
I say nothing for the first hour. Lorenzo lets the silence sit. He’s known me long enough to read this version of me in the driver’s seat. He drinks his coffee and watches the road.
The rearview mirror keeps offering her to me, and I keep refusing it.
She’s not back there. She’s in the driveway of the house I just left her at. There’s no room for her where I’m going. So, I do what I’ve done with everything I couldn’t afford to feel for twenty years.
I put it somewhere else, and I close the door.
By the time we hit Westchester, I’m steady again.
Vincenzo’s estate is on a road that’s been pretending not to exist since 1968. The hedges are too tall. The driveway has no sign. You either know which gate is his, or you drive past it. I’ve come up this driveway more times than I could count, for Sunday dinners and bad news and the night he taught me to clean a gun and the morning after my first kill.
We don’t come up the driveway today.
We park a quarter mile down, in the access lane behind the property line. The other two SUVs peel off and spread along the perimeter. Lorenzo’s out of the car before it’s fully stopped, dropping to one knee in the brush, gun across his thigh, already counting heads through the hedge.
I crouch beside him.
“How many?”
“Four when I left at sunrise. Could be more now. They haven’t closed the east cameras. Vincenzo never bothered to patch the dead spot under the loading dock.”
“And the will?”
“They’ve been at it since at least three AM. Brought in some guy with a drill. Didn’t look like it was going great.” Lorenzo glances at me. “If it hasn’t opened yet, it’s not opening to them. I heard the old man bought that vault from some German company in the eighties. You’d need a team.”
I gaze over the house.
The library window on the second floor where I studied for the bar. The garden around the back. There’s a man I don’t know smoking by the garage. Two more by the front gate. One walking the path between the rose beds, his hand never far from his side.
They’re walking the grounds like they belong here.
They don’t. And in about forty seconds, every one of them is going to understand that with total clarity.
