Chapter 5 - FLOOR FOURTEEN
Alessandro stood motionless in Luca's hidden archive while the man he had called brother smiled at him through a surveillance camera.
Lily could not hear Luca's voice.
She saw Rosa on the screen and began pulling toward it.
Alessandro held her back.
Rosa's wrists were tied to the chair.
A dark bruise marked one side of her face.
Vivian stood behind her with one hand resting on the chair as if they were posing for a photograph.
Luca leaned against the table.
"You were always difficult to surprise."
Alessandro stepped closer to the camera.
"Where are you?"
Luca laughed.
"You found my room and still think I'm going to answer that."
"Release Rosa."
"You don't even know her."
Alessandro looked at Lily.
"I know enough."
Luca's expression changed slightly.
"The child warned you."
Alessandro said nothing.
Vivian moved into view.
The red gown that had looked elegant beneath chandeliers now looked almost black under fluorescent light.
"We didn't want the girl involved."
Alessandro's stare turned to her.
"You poisoned my wine."
Vivian did not deny it.
That hurt more than denial would have.
"It wasn't personal."
Alessandro almost smiled.
"You were going to marry me in six weeks."
"Exactly."
Luca looked at Vivian with a familiarity that no longer needed hiding.
"Marriage would have complicated the timing."
Alessandro's hand closed around the edge of the desk.
For one brutal second, the room behind the screen disappeared and he saw fifteen years of shared meals, graves, funerals, hospital rooms, meetings, birthdays, and blood.
He saw Luca lying in a Queens garage with a bullet through his side.
He saw himself carrying Luca to the car.
He saw the scar.
Then he saw Rosa bound to the chair.
"What happened to Miguel Delgado?"
Luca's smile faded.
Vivian glanced at him.
That glance told Alessandro the question mattered.
"Floor fourteen."
Alessandro held up the old brass key.
"What does this open?"
For the first time, Luca looked truly alarmed.
Rosa lifted her head.
She saw the key through the monitor.
Her eyes widened.
She began struggling against the rope.
Vivian grabbed her shoulder.
"Sit still."
Rosa spat in Vivian's face.
Lily saw it.
The child stopped shaking.
A tiny, fierce expression crossed her features.
Vivian wiped her cheek.
Then she struck Rosa.
Lily lunged toward the screen.
Alessandro caught her.
His voice became quieter.
"Touch her again and this stops being a negotiation."
Luca laughed without humor.
"It stopped being a negotiation fifteen years ago."
Alessandro stared at him.
"What happened fifteen years ago?"
"You happened."
Luca stepped closer to the camera.
"You found me bleeding behind that laundromat and decided you had saved me."
"I did save you."
"You bought me."
"I paid for your surgery."
"Then you spent fifteen years reminding everyone I owed you my life."
Alessandro's jaw tightened.
"I never asked you for repayment."
"You didn't have to."
Luca touched the scar on his cheek.
"Every person in your house looked at this and saw your generosity."
He smiled bitterly.
"Nobody asked what I wanted."
Alessandro looked at the photograph of Miguel.
"So you built an empire inside mine."
"I built the part that actually works."
Vivian interrupted.
"Enough."
She looked into the camera.
"The key opens a locker in Penn Station."
Luca turned sharply toward her.
"Vivian."
"He already has it."
She ignored him.
"Locker 214."
Alessandro glanced at the stamp.
"What's inside?"
"Miguel's insurance."
Rosa jerked against the ropes.
Luca's anger sharpened.
"Stop talking."
Vivian faced him.
"If Alessandro thinks we have nothing to offer, Rosa becomes useless."
Their first open disagreement appeared in front of him.
Alessandro recognized opportunity instantly.
"She's already useless to you."
Luca's eyes returned to the camera.
"Then why haven't we killed her?"
Lily stared at his moving mouth.
She did not understand the sentence.
Alessandro was grateful for that.
"Because Vivian needs Rosa alive."
Vivian's expression tightened.
Luca glanced at her.
Alessandro continued.
"You don't."
He pointed toward Vivian through the screen.
"She poisoned me because she wants control after my death."
Then he pointed at Luca.
"You helped because you think she wants you beside her."
Neither spoke.
Alessandro saw the fracture widen.
"But a Duca daughter doesn't marry a soldier."
Luca's face hardened.
Vivian stepped forward.
"Careful."
Alessandro ignored her.
"Once I'm dead, her family gets the alliance, the properties, the ports, and the legitimacy."
His eyes stayed on Luca.
"What do you get?"
Luca's mouth became a line.
Vivian said his name.
"Luca."
Alessandro smiled faintly.
"There it is."
Luca shut off the camera.
The screen went black.
Lily immediately signed.
Mama.
Alessandro crouched in front of her.
He wanted to promise Rosa would come back.
He had made one promise already that night.
Safe.
He had failed it within an hour.
So he signed something different.
I will find her.
Lily studied his face.
Then she nodded.
Marco had spent the entire conversation searching the hidden network.
"Signal bounced through six servers."
"Can you locate the room?"
"Not precisely."
Marco pulled up a map.
"But the final internal relay came from a Moretti property in Manhattan."
Alessandro looked at the address.
It was the unfinished high-rise on West Fifty-Seventh Street.
The same project where Miguel Delgado had supposedly fallen to his death.
Floor fourteen.
Alessandro ordered Marco to prepare two teams.
Then he called a retired transit officer who owed him a favor.
"Penn Station."
"Locker 214."
"Open it without touching anything inside."
The officer called back twenty-six minutes later.
His voice was uneasy.
"There's a flash drive, a phone, and an envelope."
"Name on the envelope?"
"Yours."
Alessandro looked at Miguel's photograph.
"Bring everything to the mansion."
He left Lily with two guards he had chosen personally from men who had served his father before Luca entered the family.
She refused until Alessandro gave her Hopper.
Then he and Marco drove to Manhattan through heavy rain.
The high-rise rose into the storm like a black skeleton.
Construction had stopped for the night.
The lobby guards were gone.
The security cameras had been broken.
Alessandro entered with six men.
They took the emergency stairs because the elevators had been disabled.
At floor fourteen, the fire door stood open.
Plastic sheeting moved in the wind from unfinished windows.
Rain blew across raw concrete.
A single work light glowed near the center of the floor.
Beneath it sat Rosa Delgado.
Alessandro stopped.
She was alone.
Her hands were no longer tied.
Her head hung forward.
Marco raised his weapon.
"Could be a trap."
Alessandro approached anyway.
Rosa lifted her face.
"Where is Lily?"
"Safe."
Rosa flinched at the word.
Alessandro understood why.
"She's at the mansion."
Rosa tried to stand.
Her knees failed.
Alessandro caught her.
"Luca?"
"Gone."
"Vivian?"
"Gone."
Rosa gripped his sleeve.
"They left me because they want you here."
Alessandro looked around.
"Why?"
Rosa pointed toward the open edge of the building.
Rosa remembered the ride to floor fourteen in fragments.
A blindfold over her eyes.
Plastic biting into her wrists.
Vivian's perfume in the enclosed vehicle.
Luca's voice arguing somewhere near the front.
She could not hear every word because the engine and rain swallowed pieces, but she heard enough.
"The child was not part of this."
Vivian answered sharply.
"The child made herself part of it."
"You moved too early."
"Miguel escaped."
Rosa stopped breathing at her husband's name.
Luca lowered his voice.
"We recovered him."
Vivian replied.
"For how long?"
That single exchange had changed Rosa's entire understanding of the past eighteen months.
Miguel had escaped something.
A dead man could not escape.
Rosa twisted against the restraints.
Vivian noticed.
"She's listening."
The vehicle stopped.
Someone pulled Rosa out.
When the blindfold came off, she was standing on the unfinished fourteenth floor where wind and rain moved freely through the skeletal building.
She recognized the place from Miguel's old photographs.
He had once sent her a picture from the same floor with Manhattan behind him.
He had written that one day he would bring Lily to the top when the building was finished.
Now Rosa stood where he had supposedly died.
Luca pointed toward the temporary railing.
"This is where the report says he fell."
Rosa stared at him.
"You wrote the report?"
"No."
Vivian answered for him.
"A safety officer did."
"After being paid."
Luca glared at her.
Vivian shrugged.
"Why pretend now?"
Rosa's grief turned to rage.
"Where is Miguel?"
Vivian stepped close.
"Your husband is alive because he hid something we need."
Rosa's knees nearly failed.
The city disappeared around her.
Alive.
One word erased a funeral and created a nightmare larger than the grief it replaced.
"Let me see him."
"Tell us what the key opens."
Rosa's face betrayed recognition before she could stop it.
Luca saw.
"So you found it."
Rosa stayed silent.
Vivian smiled.
"Your daughter carries that rabbit everywhere."
"Did Miguel hide something inside it?"
Rosa realized then that they had searched Hopper before.
They knew a key existed.
They did not know where it led.
That was why Rosa was alive.
She forced herself to breathe slowly.
"I don't know."
Vivian struck her.
Rosa tasted blood.
"Wrong answer."
Luca stepped between them.
"Enough."
Vivian stared at him.
"You have become sentimental at an inconvenient time."
"You have become reckless at a fatal one."
Their anger was not staged.
Rosa understood that the two people betraying Alessandro were also beginning to betray each other.
That was the only advantage she had.
So Rosa looked at Vivian and lied.
"Luca already knows where the key goes."
Luca turned sharply.
Vivian's expression changed.
Rosa continued before either could stop her.
"He asked me about Penn Station months ago."
It was nonsense.
But the flicker of suspicion in Vivian's eyes made it useful.
Luca laughed.
"She's trying to divide us."
Vivian did not laugh.
Rosa stored that reaction away.
If she survived, Alessandro needed to know one thing.
The conspiracy was already cracking.
A temporary railing ran along the concrete floor.
One section was newer than the rest.
"Miguel didn't fall."
Her voice broke.
"They made me believe he did."
Alessandro followed her gaze.
"How do you know?"
Rosa reached into her torn apron and pulled out a folded photograph Vivian had forced into her hand before leaving.
It showed Miguel alive in the underground room.
On the back, a date had been written.
Three days after his funeral.
Rosa's fingers shook.
"He was alive after I buried him."
Alessandro said nothing.
Rosa looked at the concrete beneath them.
"And this is where he found what Luca was hiding."
A phone began ringing somewhere in the darkness.
Everyone turned.
The sound came from a plastic toolbox near the railing.
Alessandro opened it.
Inside was a burner phone.
He answered.
Luca's voice came through immediately.
"You always did arrive exactly where I needed you."
Alessandro scanned the unfinished floor.
"Where are you?"
"Close enough."
"You left Rosa alive."
"For you."
"Why?"
Luca's voice softened.
"Because when the police find her body beside yours, the story becomes beautifully simple."
A red dot appeared on Alessandro's chest.
Marco shouted.
Alessandro turned just as the first shot shattered the work light.
May you like
Darkness swallowed floor fourteen.
