Chapter 10 - The King of Chicago Had a Leak
Victor Marlowe did not come downstairs.
He did not need to.
His voice carried through the boathouse as if the building belonged to him.
“Dominic, send Evelyn upstairs with the ledgers.”
Dominic looked at Evelyn.
She shook her head.
“Don’t.”
Marlowe continued.
“In exchange, the rest of you walk away.”
Vincent muttered, “Generous.”
Clara whispered, “He doesn’t know how many ledgers there are.”
Dominic looked at her.
“Meaning?”
“He said ‘the ledgers.’ Not the cabinet. He hasn’t seen this room.”
Arthur understood.
“He doesn’t know exactly what Anna hid.”
Clara nodded.
“Good.”
Dominic raised his voice.
“You killed my father.”
Silence above.
Then Marlowe laughed.
“You found that page.”
Dominic’s jaw tightened.
“You admit it?”
“I admit your father was sentimental. Sentimental men become liabilities.”
Evelyn’s face went white.
“And my father?”
Marlowe paused.
“Elias should have taken the money.”
She took one step toward the stairs.
Arthur stopped her.
Marlowe continued.
“He believed evidence mattered. So did Anna Bennett.”
Clara’s heart pounded.
“What did you do to my mother?”
Dominic turned toward her.
Marlowe’s answer came slowly.
“Nothing.”
Clara did not believe him.
“Your mother was smarter than Salvatore. She knew when to disappear.”
“My mother died eight years later.”
“Yes.”
“Did you have anything to do with it?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly to read.
Dominic leaned close to Clara.
“We’re getting out.”
“How?”
“There’s another exit.”
Arthur stared.
“There wasn’t.”
“When we were kids, Vincent broke through the east wall because he thought there was buried treasure.”
Vincent looked offended.
“I was nine.”
“You were twelve.”
“Still young enough to have vision.”
Dominic pointed toward a boarded section near the rear.
Arthur and Marco moved quietly.
Behind old shelving, a narrow maintenance passage ran toward the shoreline.
Clara looked at the cabinet.
“We can’t leave this.”
“We can leave paper,” Dominic said.
“No.”
“Clara.”
“If Marlowe gets it, seventeen years disappears.”
Evelyn stepped beside her.
“She’s right.”
Dominic looked ready to argue with both of them.
Then Vincent opened a waterproof storage trunk.
“We take the originals that matter and photograph the rest.”
Clara shook her head.
“No network.”
“Offline cameras.”
For five frantic minutes they worked.
Pages documenting Marlowe’s payments.
The pharmaceutical purchase.
Political accounts.
Elias’s written testimony.
Anna Bennett’s notes.
Clara found a sealed envelope.
FOR CLARA BENNETT IF SHE EVER COMES LOOKING.
Her hands trembled.
Dominic saw.
“Take it.”
She put it inside her coat without opening it.
Upstairs, Marlowe lost patience.
“You have thirty seconds.”
Dominic closed the trunk.
Arthur and Marco moved it into the maintenance passage.
Evelyn remained.
“I’ll stay.”
“No,” Clara said.
“He expects me.”
“That’s why you’re not staying.”
Evelyn looked at her.
“You don’t owe me protection.”
“No. But your father and my mother worked together. I think they’d be annoyed if we started sacrificing each other now.”
For the first time, Evelyn smiled.
Very slightly.
They entered the passage.
Dominic went last.
Before closing the panel, he shouted upstairs.
“Come get it.”
Then he kicked over a lantern.
Not fire.
Just noise.
Marlowe’s men rushed down.
By then the group had reached the shoreline tunnel.
They emerged behind a stone retaining wall seventy yards from the boathouse.
Snow whipped across the lake.
Vehicles waited at the road.
Marco’s security team had positioned them earlier.
They loaded the trunk.
Then headlights appeared behind them.
Three SUVs.
Marlowe.
The chase lasted fifteen minutes.
No cinematic explosions.
No impossible maneuvers.
Only icy roads, controlled panic, and the terrifying realization that one mistake could send them into a ditch.
Dominic kept one hand braced against Clara’s seat.
“Stay down.”
“I am down.”
“Lower.”
“I physically cannot become part of the floor.”
A sharp crack struck the rear window.
Clara flinched.
Dominic covered her with his body.
The reinforced glass held.
The driver accelerated.
At the highway interchange, Arthur’s second vehicle turned south while Dominic’s turned east.
Marlowe’s SUVs followed the wrong car.
By 2:30 a.m., Dominic’s group reached a private safe property outside Kenosha.
Only then did anyone breathe normally.
Clara opened the sealed envelope.
Her mother’s handwriting filled four pages.
She read silently at first.
Then aloud.
“Clara, if you are reading this, I failed to keep you outside a story that should never have belonged to you.”
Her voice caught.
Dominic sat beside her.
She continued.
“Elias and I discovered that Marlowe’s network reached farther than Salvatore knew. One person inside the Castellano organization helped him.”
Everyone looked up.
Clara read the next sentence.
“I never learned the traitor’s name. Salvatore believed it was someone young enough to inherit everything after he was gone.”
Vincent went still.
Dominic’s expression darkened.
Clara continued.
“Do not assume the obvious. Marlowe survives by convincing powerful men that betrayal is coming from the person closest to them.”
Evelyn whispered, “That’s what he’s doing with Vincent.”
Clara nodded.
Her mother had seen the pattern seventeen years ago.
Then came the last paragraph.
“I hid the original ledger because copies can be altered. If Marlowe returns, expose him publicly, not privately. He cannot be defeated in a room where he controls the doors.”
Dominic looked toward the trunk.
Publicly.
That changed everything.
Marlowe expected a mafia war.
He expected Dominic to retaliate quietly.
Violently.
Predictably.
Anna Bennett was telling them to do the opposite.
Clara finished the letter.
“There is one more thing. The person who helped Marlowe had access to Salvatore’s private office and knew where Arthur would be every Sunday morning.”
Arthur frowned.
“Every Sunday…”
His face changed.
Dominic saw it.
“What?”
Arthur looked at Pierce.
Pierce stared back.
“No.”
Arthur whispered, “Sunday morning security schedules were prepared by the family office.”
Pierce shook his head.
“I never prepared them.”
“Who did?”
Pierce’s expression slowly changed.
“One person.”
Dominic knew the answer before he spoke.
His former executive assistant.
A man who now ran operations across every Castellano company.
A man who had been at the gala.
A man who had access to Vincent’s office.
A man Clara had seen nearly every day since beginning the audit.
Daniel Mercer.
Dominic’s chief operating officer.
The man Dominic had trusted to keep every legitimate company running while he handled the rest.
Clara remembered something.
At the gala, just before Vincent asked her to dance, Mercer had handed Vincent a jacket.
He had said it was getting cold near the terrace.
That jacket had contained the tracker.
Clara felt the final piece click into place.
“The tracker.”
Dominic’s face went cold.
“Mercer put it there.”
Vincent sat down slowly.
“And he had my authorization codes.”
Pierce added, “And access to every shell company.”
Dominic looked at Marco.
“Where is Mercer now?”
Marco checked the offline list of security assignments.
His face drained.
“Chicago.”
“Where?”
“At your house.”
Dominic stood immediately.
Clara understood why.
Dominic’s residence contained something more important than accounts.
His mother’s personal archive.
Family records.
Documents.
And one person they had left there under protection.
Dominic’s aunt Sofia.
The last surviving member of Salvatore’s generation.
Dominic grabbed his coat.
Marlowe had never wanted Blackwater alone.
He had used it to pull Dominic out of Chicago.
And Daniel Mercer, the man inside the Castellano organization, now had the one thing Marlowe still lacked:
May you like
access to Dominic’s home.
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