Chapter 2 - THE APARTMENT THEY TORE APART
Dominic would not let Emma enter first.
She hated that part of her was relieved.
One guard restored the entrance light while another checked the narrow lobby. The apartment manager emerged from behind his office door, pale and shaking.
“I heard someone upstairs.”
“Did you call police?” Emma asked.
“I was about to.”
Dominic looked at him.
“Do it now.”
The manager recognized him and reached for the phone immediately.
Emma climbed the stairs behind two guards. Dominic remained beside her, holding the black envelope inside one gloved hand.
Her apartment door stood open.
The frame had been split near the lock.
Inside, every drawer had been emptied.
Her clothes covered the floor. Kitchen cabinets hung open. The mattress had been overturned. A wooden box containing her father’s photographs lay shattered beneath the window.
Emma pushed past Dominic.
“My father’s things.”
She dropped beside the broken box.
Daniel Hale had died nine years earlier in what police described as a highway accident. Most of what remained of him fit inside that box.
A watch.
Several photographs.
A handwritten recipe.
Old receipts from the accounting office where he had worked.
Emma picked up the cracked photograph of herself at age ten.
Dominic stood behind her.
“I knew your father.”
She turned.
Rainwater ran from her hair onto her sweater.
“You recognized me at the store?”
“I recognized the name.”
“You asked for my name after paying.”
“Yes.”
“You knew who I was before we left.”
“I suspected.”
Emma rose.
“So the groceries were not kindness.”
“They were groceries.”
“That is not an answer.”
Dominic’s jaw tightened.
“Your father once worked for my family.”
“My father was a forensic accountant.”
“He audited companies connected to my father.”
“Connected how?”
Dominic did not answer immediately.
Emma laughed bitterly.
“Of course.”
Police sirens approached outside.
Dominic lowered his voice.
“Daniel discovered money disappearing from several Russo businesses. He believed the transfers were connected to judges, police officers, and men inside my father’s organization.”
“Your criminal organization.”
“Yes.”
The admission came without performance.
Emma looked toward the photograph of the metal key.
“What does it open?”
“I do not know.”
“Then why did you say it belonged to you?”
“Because my father died searching for it.”
Emma stared at him.
Dominic continued.
“Three days before Daniel’s accident, he sent my father a message. He said he had secured proof of who was stealing from both of them. He mentioned a metal key and said it would expose the person responsible.”
“My father never told me.”
“He may have been trying to protect you.”
“Protection seems to involve many men deciding what women should not know.”
Dominic accepted the accusation without flinching.
The police arrived.
Dominic’s bodyguards stepped away from the apartment and secured their weapons before officers entered.
Emma gave her statement.
She showed them the envelope and the forced door.
Dominic provided the photograph but did not attempt to direct the investigation.
While an officer examined the bedroom, Emma searched her father’s broken box.
Nothing resembled the key.
Then one detective lifted Emma’s brown shoulder bag from the floor.
“The lining has been cut.”
Emma took it.
Her father had given her the bag before she started college. She had repaired the lining twice but never replaced it.
A narrow slit now ran along the inner seam.
Someone had searched inside it.
Dominic looked at the opening.
“Was anything removed?”
“I do not know.”
Emma pushed her fingers beneath the fabric.
Something hard touched her fingertip.
She pulled.
A small metal key emerged from the lining.
The same shape shown in the photograph.
Everyone became silent.
Emma looked at Dominic.
“You knew it was in my bag.”
“No.”
“But someone did.”
Dominic examined the key without touching it.
A number had been stamped near the base.
Not an address.
Not a bank name.
Only three digits.
The police photographed it and placed it inside an evidence bag.
Emma looked at the destroyed apartment.
“Where am I supposed to sleep?”
Dominic answered too quickly.
“With protection.”
“I am not going to your house.”
“I did not ask you to.”
“You were about to.”
He held her stare.
“Yes.”
Emma folded her arms.
“I do not know you.”
“You know enough to be afraid.”
“I know enough not to become dependent on you.”
Dominic looked toward the open doorway.
“Someone broke into your home while you were buying food. They knew about the key your father hid nine years ago. Remaining alone is not independence.”
“And standing inside a mafia boss’s house is not safety.”
“No.”
His honesty disturbed her.
“It is simply the location I can control best.”
Emma looked toward the police officers.
“I want a hotel chosen by them, not you.”
Dominic nodded.
“Fine.”
She studied him carefully.
“You are not going to argue?”
“You made a reasonable demand.”
Emma held the grocery bag tighter.
“What happens now?”
Dominic glanced toward the sealed evidence containing the key.
May you like
“We find out why someone waited nine years to start searching.”
Continue to the next part: The key leads to a safe deposit box opened under Daniel Hale’s name, but the person waiting outside the bank belongs to Dominic’s own family.
