“Service entrance,” Lorenzo says. “Same way I got out. Through the kitchen, down the back stairs. Avoid the guards. Twenty minutes in and out, max.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’m done sneaking.”
He looks at me.
I stand up and walk out of the tree line, crossing the access lane and the small, wooded strip until I’m out in the clear sightline of the front gate.
The two guards see me too late.
The first one’s reaching for his radio when I shoot him. The second one’s bringing his sidearm up, and Lorenzo takes him with one round.
We move.
Through the gate. Across the gravel. The man at the garage drops his cigarette and turns just as Lorenzo puts him down. The idiot on the rose path is sprinting toward the side door. He doesn’t make it.
The front door’s unlocked. They hadn’t bothered. They thought they were the only people in the world this morning.
We push our way in.
The foyer is exactly the same as I remember. The marble. The chandelier. The portrait of Vincenzo’s grandmother at the foot of the staircase that he kissed every morning out of habit. There’s a fresh muddy footprint on the rug under the chandelier. Whoever’s in this house isn’t bothering to take their shoes off.
I find that more offensive than I should, given what I’m about to do.
Two more assholes come down the main stairs, fast, drawn by the noise at the door. We take them on the landing. They go down the rest of the steps in a tangle. The chandelier shakes once and steadies.
I step over them on my way to the basement door.
Down.
Past the wine cellar—the long racks Vincenzo kept stocked becausea man should die with two cases of his favorite year unopened, Raffaele.Past the second cellar, where he kept the stuff he actually drank.
To the back wall.
The vault has to be here.
Behind a rack of vintage Barolo there’s a panel.
Lorenzo’s still at my shoulder. “You want me to grab you something while you’re down here, boss? Water? The good scotch? Last I saw, we were going up, not down.”
“Stay at the top of the stairs. Watch the cellar door. If anyone comes through it, I want to hear about it before they’re on me.”
He goes.
I pull the rack.
It comes away easier than I thought.
The room behind it is concrete. Single bulb. A small table. A vault, four feet high, the dial polished to a soft gleam by forty years of one man’s hand.
No scratches on it. No drill marks. Untouched.
That tracks. The one Lorenzo saw them sweating over upstairs is a decoy—Vincenzo had it built into the study wall for exactly that reason: a heavy, obvious, expensive-looking box designed to eat a man’s whole night and give him nothing at the end of it. Strong enough to be worth the trouble. Empty enough to be a joke. They’ll still be at it for hours.
This one is the opposite. Hidden, but not hardened. The old man’s logic, all the way down—the thing nobody knows about doesn’t need a wall around it.
