Chapter 2 - THE MAN DOMINIC BURIED
Anthony caught his shoulder.
“Boss. We don’t know who’s downstairs.”
Dominic looked at the photograph on his phone again.
Camille beneath the chandelier.
Gabriel beside her.
Eleven years of grief stared back at him from a six-inch screen.
“Then we find out.”
Claire stayed behind them as they moved toward the east staircase.
The mansion’s emergency lights painted the walls red. Guests crowded the salon exits while Vescari security pushed people toward the garden terrace.
No one appeared injured.
That was the first thing Dominic noticed.
The second was the smell.
Gunpowder.
Anthony spoke into a backup radio.
“What happened?”
A guard answered through static.
“Three men came through the service entrance wearing event-crew jackets. Wouldn’t stop. Warning shots were fired into the ceiling. Two surrendered. One ran.”
“Casualties?”
“None.”
Dominic kept walking.
“Camille?”
A pause.
“Ballroom.”
He entered through the north doors.
The room looked abandoned after a storm.
Broken champagne glasses still glittered across the marble.
Chairs stood crooked.
The huge chandelier trembled faintly above the empty dance floor.
Camille stood beneath it.
And beside her stood a man Dominic had mourned for eleven years.
Gabriel Vescari had more gray in his hair than Dominic remembered.
He was thinner.
A pale scar ran from his left temple into his hairline.
But the eyes were the same.
Dark.
Restless.
Always noticing the door before the person speaking to him.
Dominic stopped twenty feet away.
Gabriel looked at him.
“Hello, Dom.”
Dominic crossed the distance before anyone could react.
He grabbed Gabriel by the front of his coat and slammed him against a marble column.
Claire gasped.
Camille stepped forward.
“Dominic—”
“Don’t.”
One word stopped her.
Dominic stared into his brother’s face.
“I carried your coffin.”
Gabriel didn’t fight him.
“I know.”
“I watched them lower you into the ground.”
“I know.”
“For eleven years, I put flowers on your grave.”
Something changed in Gabriel’s eyes.
“That part,” he said quietly, “I didn’t know.”
Dominic’s fist tightened.
“Give me one reason.”
Gabriel reached slowly inside his coat.
Anthony raised his weapon.
Gabriel froze.
“Easy.”
He withdrew an old wristwatch.
Then opened his palm.
Dominic went still.
Brown leather band.
Cracked crystal.
A small dent beside the four.
Their father had given Gabriel that watch on his twenty-first birthday.
Dominic remembered identifying it after the warehouse fire.
Remembered seeing it sealed inside an evidence bag.
Remembered being told it had been removed from the dead man’s wrist.
Gabriel dropped it into Dominic’s hand.
“You buried my watch,” he said. “Not me.”
Dominic stared at it.
“That watch was on the body.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Because somebody put it there.”
The silence between them became heavier than anger.
Claire looked toward Camille.
“You knew?”
Camille’s face had lost all its confidence.
“I knew Gabriel was alive.”
Dominic turned to her.
“How long?”
“Six weeks.”
His expression hardened.
“Six weeks.”
“I was trying to understand what my father had done.”
“You could have told me.”
“I thought you’d kill him before I could prove anything.”
Gabriel gave a humorless laugh.
“She gives herself too much credit.”
Camille looked at him.
“I brought you here.”
“No.”
Gabriel’s gaze returned to Dominic.
“She found me.”
He pointed toward Claire.
“But somebody else brought me back to Philadelphia.”
“Who?”
Gabriel didn’t answer immediately.
Instead he glanced at Anthony.
Anthony’s jaw tightened.
Dominic saw it.
“You two know each other.”
Anthony slowly lowered his weapon.
“I knew him eleven years ago.”
Gabriel shook his head.
“You knew me thirty minutes before I supposedly died.”
Claire felt the air change.
Dominic stepped between them.
“Anthony?”
Anthony stared at Gabriel.
“I thought you were dead.”
“That made two of us for a while.”
Dominic looked from one man to the other.
“No more fragments. No more games.”
Gabriel nodded.
“Fine.”
He took the watch back and turned it over.
The rear casing had been scratched badly, but underneath the damage were three engraved initials.
G.V.
“After the fire, I woke up inside a delivery truck three blocks from the warehouse.”
Dominic frowned.
“You were kidnapped?”
“I don’t remember leaving the building. I remember a beam coming down. I remember someone dragging me. Then I remember a man telling the driver I wasn’t supposed to wake up.”
Camille folded her arms around herself.
Gabriel continued.
“I got out when the truck stopped at a light.”
“You expect me to believe you vanished for eleven years because you fell out of a truck?”
“No.”
For the first time, Gabriel looked ashamed.
“I vanished because of what happened afterward.”
Dominic waited.
“A man found me behind a closed mechanic’s shop. My ribs were broken. Half my face was covered in blood.”
“Who?”
Gabriel reached into his coat again.
This time he removed an old photograph.
The edges were soft from age.
He gave it to Dominic.
Four men stood outside a construction site.
One was Salvatore Vescari, Dominic and Gabriel’s father.
A younger Richard Sterling stood beside him.
The third man was unfamiliar.
The fourth wore a work jacket and held an electrician’s helmet beneath his arm.
Claire made a small sound.
Dominic looked at her.
All the color had disappeared from her face.
She moved closer.
“Where did you get that?”
Gabriel watched her.
“From the man who saved me.”
Claire touched the photograph with trembling fingers.
The electrician was younger.
He had more hair.
His shoulders were straight.
But she knew that smile.
“That’s my father.”
Nobody spoke.
Claire looked at Gabriel.
“Patrick Donovan saved you?”
Gabriel nodded.
“Eleven years ago.”
Her eyes filled with confusion.
“My father never mentioned you.”
“He had reasons.”
“What reasons?”
Gabriel’s gaze moved toward the damaged chandelier.
“Because your father found something at that warehouse before it burned.”
Claire shook her head.
“My dad was an electrician.”
“He was.”
Gabriel stepped closer.
“He was also the last person to see who loosened the rigging above me that night.”
Dominic looked up at the chandelier.
Fresh tool marks.
Loosened bolts.
A falling bracket.
The similarity was impossible to ignore.
Claire whispered, “The same thing happened before?”
Gabriel nodded.
“Almost.”
Then he looked directly at Dominic.
“The difference is, eleven years ago, it worked.”
Dominic’s face hardened.
“Who did Patrick see?”
Gabriel hesitated.
“My brother deserves to hear this from him.”
“He had a stroke.”
“I know.”
Claire stared.
“How could you possibly know that?”
Gabriel looked at her with something close to regret.
“Because someone has been watching Patrick for years.”
Claire’s breathing stopped.
The photographs outside her room.
The bus stop.
The grocery store.
The rehabilitation center.
She had thought the surveillance began because of the recording.
Gabriel slowly turned the old photograph over.
Three words were written across the back in faded blue ink.
DONOVAN KNOWS EVERYTHING.
Beneath them was a date.
Not three weeks ago.
Not three months ago.
Eleven years ago.
Claire looked at Dominic.
“They weren’t watching me because I recorded that conversation.”
“No,” Dominic said.
His eyes stayed on the photograph.
“They were watching you before you ever entered this house.”
And suddenly Claire understood the most terrifying part.
May you like
Her job at the Vescari mansion might never have been an accident.
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